Logan: Vlad, thanks for doing this.
Vlad: Thanks for having me.
Logan: So, uh, brand. Robinhood has a brand. Brands can be kind of an ethereal thing that's sort of hard to attribute, uh, ROI to or think about. Um, how do you think about what a brand is and then what Robinhood's brand is?
Vlad: It's a, it's a great question. I spent a lot of time thinking about this. Uh, I think to some degree, everyone has a different, uh, definition of brand. It kind of depends on who's talking. So some people refer to it as, you know, the brand marketing that you do, the videos that you run on YouTube or on cable TV.
Um, I think those are parts of it. I think to me, um, um, When I think about the brand, it is, if someone is describing Robin Hood to a friend and I'm not in the room, what do they say about Robin Hood? Because usually they try to distill it in as simple and short of a message as possible. And, you know, if, if we're doing our job right, they're telling their friends about Robin Hood effusively.
And that's been kind of our. leading driver of growth over time. You know, when we were a young company, we knew that We wouldn't be able to compete with the likes of Schwab and Fidelity and Scottrade and E Trade and all the companies, some of which don't exist anymore on marketing budgets. They spend thousands of dollars to [00:02:00] acquire a customer.
Um, they have, you know, incredibly large television budgets and, and things like that. So, uh, our, our one chance to be remembered and to actually grow would be to build. A company and a product and a brand that people would talk about. And, um, you know, one thing that my co founder Beju and I always talked about is we can help sort of like plant seeds of messaging in customers minds.
And if that messaging follows the transitive property, then we know the messaging is right. And what I mean by that is if I tell you what Robinhood is in one sentence, and you can tell your friend that, And you're kind of relaying the same message, then the message has coherence, the more and more people talk about it.
And I think we were able to do that from the earliest points. I mean, it was very simple. To communicate, uh, when we launched that other places charge you up to 10 every time you trade. Uh, stop paying that and we're kind of the vehicle that eliminated commissions industry wide.
Logan: And so in that way, brands kind of intertwined with business model is intertwined with products. It's intertwined with some other principles, I guess, like all these things are kind of tied together.
Vlad: Yeah, the company name as well. I
Logan: Maybe, maybe speak to that. I heard, I heard a Jeff Bezos quote that you referenced. I think it's Bezos that said, uh, the company name may be only matters 3%, but it could be the 3 percent that, that matters.
Uh, don't know if I'm wrongly attributing it to Jeff Bezos, but.
Vlad: yeah, uh, I think, I think that was a Jeff Bezos quote. Yeah, it seems like you went deep in the, in the podcast interview archive. Uh, it's very good. I think it's really important when you're making a decision about something that has to do with brand or [00:04:00] messaging to not only consider things that are universally positive.
So, I think the interesting thing about the name is. We were about 10 person company when we came up with the name Robin Hood, and there were some other contenders for the name. We thought of naming the company Omaha, and sometimes I think, you know, if if we named the company Omaha, would Warren Buffett be criticizing it aggressively?
Because, you know, He can't criticize Omaha.
Logan: Yeah, he's very pro, pro Omaha
Vlad: Um, I think we could have avoided that. But basically, when, uh, Beju and I came up with the name Robin Hood, and we sort of, like, presented it to the team, we had some people threaten to quit. They were like, we hate the name. Um, the entire business model is going to involve serving lots and lots of customers, but we don't want to scare off the wealthy people because if you look at economics of a financial services company, they tend to be concentrated in wealthier people.
So there was just this fear that we would piss off. The rich people and that they wouldn't want to join Robinhood because they would be worried we would take their money and redistribute it or The other half of our employees loved it. And uh, our, our thoughts on that at the time were, and we both really loved it.
So maybe you could say that we were rationalizing the decision we had already made, but
Logan: and and your wife maybe deserves some credit for, uh, describing the product I think related to Robin Hood in way was the original Genesis. So at home you, you also had a tie breaking boat if needed.
Vlad: that was, that was, uh, that was definitely part of the origin. Yeah. My wife was, uh, We were dating at the time. She was my girlfriend and she would explain what I was doing. And the answer was, uh, I was not doing very much to a objective observer. I was sort of working on this company, making very [00:06:00] little money.
Uh, she was a doctor. So. Um, you know, when, when, uh, she would meet my parents and I would meet her family, the, uh, the running joke for a while was that she had the stable income. And so she would have to support all of my entrepreneurial endeavors. And my parents felt a little bit sorry for her, like, are you sure you want to marry this guy?
He doesn't have a job. Uh, he didn't finish his PhD. But, uh, anyway, we got the idea for Robin Hood, and she was telling her friends that, you know, he's in finance, and then there would just be like a little bit of a groan. Like, uh, they thought I was some kind of investment banker or a venture capitalist or something.
Logan: Yeah. Even worse than the
Vlad: Yeah, but there was a little bit of a groan and, uh, and then she'd be like, no, no, no, not like that. They're the Robin Hood of finance. They're trying to help the little guy. And, uh, we kind of like the sound of that. And so, our thoughts were that if the name elicited strong reactions, even if they weren't all positive, at least it would be memorable.
And that would be better than kind of a name that everyone was okay with, because maybe that one, even if it was like uniformly a little bit positive, is not as memorable.
Logan: I I've never found that any, uh, name is, is well received from, from day one for the most part. I mean, he may be like, Expensify, you know, thought that that was there. Maybe they were super pumped. But for the most part, people, when they hear the name of a company, like shrug their shoulders and say, okay, and then kind of move on.
Uh, so I, I, I, I think that reaction that people can have to it is probably, I mean, polarization or opinions is probably a good thing to set with, uh, people in some way. It means that you're standing for something. Uh, otherwise you're standing for
Vlad: And it is a big part of the brand. And Um, the name is a part of it and even though you hear a lot, product [00:08:00] is not brand, product is different, product is a huge part of brand, the messages that we put out and the way we say them are, are all part of the brand as well. And, um, yeah, I think that what we've tried from the very beginning is to be very, very consistent with what we represent.
And I think it's also consistency with the name Robinhood. Uh, we wanted it to be disruptive and we wanted our company to be disruptive too. It flew, it, it, it was intended to flow into product decisions and business decisions around how we price things as well. We wanted it to be brave and bold and, uh, courageous.
Vlad: Not to do things just because other financial companies are doing them, but Almost just as often kind of go against the the traditional flow of things and do things a little bit differently so, um, I think that that stayed pretty consistent throughout time and of course there were distractions and things that entered the brand that We perhaps didn't want to enter like all the meme stock things and GameStop and
Logan: Hey, I guess a question on, did you know at the time of all that going on that like, It was playing with fire given the volatility, uh, in the market or was it like, uh, clearly that that single situation was so unusual, but all the market changes that were going on. Did, did you have any anticipation that maybe it would end up in some way
Vlad: I I think I did. Yeah. Um, there's this old adage in the industry that anytime anything goes wrong and Uh people lose money. They tend to blame the broker, you know when you make money it's all on you but if if you lose it, it's sort of externalized to factors outside of your control and It's You know, the broker is a very, uh, sort of [00:10:00] like convenient target for that.
And I think we, we saw that in a lot of situations, GameStop probably being the, the best example there, but, um, you know, that, that's just the, I guess that's the, that's the price to pay for being in this business. You know, if, if you're serving customers and you're dealing with something as emotional as money, um, you have to have thick skin because you're going to be blamed in a lot of situations where.
You know, ultimately, you have minimal control over, over how things play out.
Logan: when something like that happens? Uh, and obviously that's the most, uh, I guess notable example. How do you go about, there's, there's probably. Customer churn and like a bunch of metrics that you can you can look at there's social media I'm sure there's some sentiment index and all of that. but how do you go about assessing?
Logan: the the brand impact and then How do you decide or set course on on rebuilding the trust? Like was there certain milestones that you said, okay, let's look three months in the future, six months in the future? Or was it just, hey, what changes can we make in the next couple days?
Vlad: Yeah, I mean, I always wanted to make the changes. If there's changes we can make in the next couple of days, those changes got to the top of the list. And of course, we tried everything. There was a hit. And I mean, you could look at it with, uh, With NPS net promoter score, which, uh, you're probably familiar, but for for viewers, you basically ask customers a question, you know, how, how much would you recommend Robin Hood to a friend?
And, you know, it's like 0 to 10. And if it's 89 or 10, that's actually a positive. under that, uh, you know, at some point it gets radicalized to zero. So it's, it's, it's a very skewed definition. Some people have issue with it and they prefer other metrics, but we found it [00:12:00] to be pretty directionally accurate.
And the things that it shows Uh, do carry signal. So, uh, we, we measured that. And that took a big hit on January 28th. And you, it was actually, you hear this phrase that trust takes a long time to be built, but can be lost in an instant. And I think that was my experience with it. Like, after January 28th.
Our NPS went down, um, and then, you know, we've had to work really, really hard over a long period of time. And time itself has played a role in, in having that recover. And I would say at this point, it's pretty much recovered. You still see some people mentioning GameStop and MemeStocks and, you know, expressing their dissatisfaction with what happened.
But it's been less and less. And part of that is time, a big part of that is us improving things and going through a number of similar events where, you know, a lot of volatile trading and meme stocks has happened and other brokers have gone down and we haven't, so. Those events like this week certainly help but uh, the biggest element is just time and I can tell you definitively It is true that it takes a while to build like there There's very few events where your NPS can spike in one day and stay at that rate But you know, I've been through an event where it can kind of plummet and takes a while for it to build back
Logan: At a personal level, like, um, uh, at what point? It seemed like you, through all that, you were running on adrenaline, and I think you referenced like lack of sleep and different stuff, and I'm sure it's like a whirlwind of, uh, emotions that, that, that, that, those weeks were. At what point, uh, did you get to that point?
You actually were [00:14:00] able to reflect a little bit on how surreal it was and, and, uh, realize that like that was a unique moment in time that very few people in the world had ever experienced anything like how long after were you able to really look back on it?
Vlad: I mean that entire year or two years I got very little sleep and there was always something crazy going on. Um, so I don't know if I ever really sat down and reflected on things. I mean, I was reflecting on things and noticing their absurdity in real time. Um, I mean, probably the craziest was I had to, I had to carry a lot of things simultaneously in mind, right?
One was, um, All of that happened, and obviously there was huge backlash, and I could see the brand sentiment was very, very negative, and customers were unhappy, and, um, I felt like Robinhood was misunderstood throughout this, and there were conspiracy theories that were quite damaging about us colluding with Citadel and hedge funds and whatnot.
And, um, you know, I thought it was like, it was definitely wrongfully accused and misinformation, and I don't know if it was intentional by others, probably to some degree, or also just misunderstanding, but I felt like it was my responsibility to fix that and get the word out and speak to as many people as possible.
So that was one thing that was going on. Simultaneously, we were the number one app in the app store ahead of Instagram and TikTok, which is unheard of for a financial services company like that hardly ever happens. So I was dealing with that and people congratulating me on all the growth, right? Um, and, you know, I had people that wouldn't normally be interested in Robin Hood or, you [00:16:00] Talking to me calling me up and offering me advice on how to handle the situation and pr strategies and offering their help Um, and and that that was pretty amazing Um, you know, I had that clubhouse with elon musk on sunday.
Um, I don't know if you remember but
Logan: relistened to it. I assume never, uh, have you ever played it back
Vlad: um, I think I have but not recently Anyway, that was like sunday late at night pacific time. Um, and Transcript by https: otter. ai You know, a couple hours before that, I got connected to him and, and he was offering advice on the whole situation. And
Logan: and he had been like a hero of, of yours from an entrepreneurial
Vlad: yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I had a lot of respect for what he did since, you know, 2009, 2010. I was, uh, before starting Robinhood, I was a Tesla shareholder. You I believed in, in that company and, uh, and what, what he's built there and other people too. Like, uh, you know, I remember getting on the phone with Zuck and Zuck offering me PR advice.
Um, Which was funny because, you know, at the time, I think he was under a lot of pressure for his public statements and how he came across in the media, but he was very helpful to me. So, yeah, sometimes in the whole sort of like scene of COVID, like I was talking to these people and it seemed like I was talking to people all around the world, but I was in a, you know, in Palo Alto and everything was virtual.
The congressional hearing was virtual. Um,
Logan: It's weird that like all of this happened, uh, and you were like in your house, uh, and the world was going on like around. It wasn't like if this had happened in a normal environment, you would've probably felt more of the day to day of someone stopping you on the street, uh, someone coming up. But, but you could put that in your phone and go.
shower, go eat, [00:18:00] uh, you know, lunch or whatever. And that world didn't exist anymore for a few minutes. And then you went right back to this virtual world of all this craziness going on. It was probably pretty surreal compartmentalization.
Vlad: and that was probably the moment at which I was like, very frustrated at the whole remote working, uh, set up like when COVID started, it was actually kind of nice for me because I had two young kids at the time and pre COVID, I wasn't spending a ton of time at home, I would kind of get back past bedtime and leave early in the morning to go to work.
And at first it was really nice, I was like, oh, the business is operating, we're getting stuff done, my kids are here, and in a meeting, my daughter can come and sit on my lap, and that's very nice. But then, uh, when we had to get into, like, unique situations, and I realized that I can't just, like, pull my team together and get into a war room and just, you know, Go for 48 hours straight triaging issues like that.
That is much more difficult virtually and kind of mentally draining too.
Logan: I guess just, just doubling back and then, and then we can move on from, from this period.
Logan: But, uh, The lessons you learned around crisis communication, uh, and
Vlad: Yeah.
Logan: maybe just communication in general from a PR standpoint. Like was there one or two salient things that either were imparted to you by Zuck or Elon, or that you, you really learned from a first principle standpoint of dealing with this?
If everyone, if anyone ever finds themselves in a situation like, not that, but situation that's problematic.
Vlad: I think the general advice that I would give on that, and it's, it's hard to follow, but it's just a lot of times like people in this role. think of themselves as actors, right? Like, oh, I'm, I'm in a role. I'm saying things. I have a script. I'm acting the role of a [00:20:00] CEO of a public company, or in that case, we were a startup.
Um, and it's when you're kind of given scripts of things to say by people that you can, you can kind of be pigeonholed into saying things that you don't feel or don't want to say. And I found it has been the most effective when you're not constantly running that loop in your head. Am I supposed to say this?
How would this be perceived by people and just say what I want to say, right? And, uh, come off authentically, have it be true. Um, and I, I don't think that's just important in crisis situations. Um, I think, I think it's like, uh, very Nietzschean in a way. It's sort of like in every. Uh, person's evolution as a human, you have to go through a stage where you're kind of like doing things that people expect of you.
And then transitioning into doing things that you feel strongly yourself and that are true to your personality and character. And I think I went through, I mean maybe I'm not like fully through that transition, but it became clear to me that that's where I needed to be somewhere in 2021.
Logan: You were running the algorithm of, or the inputs from other people and trying to piece it all together. And that led to some Frankenstein version of communication of who you are.
Vlad: Yeah.
Logan: And I guess that's true.
Vlad: like the algorithm of what should I say in this situation?
Logan: Yes. Yeah.
Vlad: well, obviously I should say not just the truth, but like what I feel, you know?
Logan: And that's probably true internally or externally, right? I imagine.
Vlad: probably true in your personal life and, uh, and, and work life as well.
Logan: What about leading employees through this? I mean, there's probably that similar lesson, uh, of, hey, be honest and communicate and, uh, and be authentic to, to them. I'm that's applicable. Is there anything else on the employee side, uh, that you learned, [00:22:00] uh, maybe, uh, changed you as a leader or how you approach managing a big organization?
Vlad: I think it's actually the same lesson. It's sort of like generally rip up the talking points once you know what you want to say and just speak authentically. I think, I think, uh, I don't know when I, when I actually said what I, when I say what I feel and what I want to say, not what is expected of me, uh, I think it comes across much better.
Logan: Uh, I guess to put a pin in this, we're, we're recording this while Roaring Kitty's back tweeting and GameStop's back in the, in the news and AMC's volatile. And, uh, I guess the, the, uh, infrastructure is in a great place to support all of that, well knock on wood, uh, as well as, um, it seems like, uh, uh, the company is hardened from all of, all of that stuff.
You guys went through and came out the other side and now, um, These specific situations aren't aren't causing the same amount of banks that maybe it once did so I guess there's a light at the end of the tunnel on these things. If you power through it.
Vlad: Yeah. I mean, I think what a lot of people don't realize is, I mean, Robinhood was a startup, uh, in those days and the amount of work that we've had to, and not just going public, but, you know, building our engineering team, uh, having. Leaders mature through various crises like that to take us where we are today, which is a company that's diversified, growing, taking market share across multiple competitive segments, expanding internationally.
It's just a different company and the people are different and more mature. And, um, I think, you know, we've gone through some growing pains of an extreme variety, but that's made us stronger.
Logan: Yeah, I would say so.
Logan: I guess a couple of industry related questions for you. Uh, if the whole [00:24:00] industry. Adopted 24 hour trading. Is that a net good thing in your mind? And what what are the negative maybe implications associated with it?
Vlad: Yeah, I think that one's easy. I don't think there'd be anything negative about that. Yeah, I mean, if, if you think about it, like, um, to me, it's a defect that there's like an idea of a market open pop. It just means that liquidity was not optimally provisioned. Yeah. There could have been a more continuous change in the price if prices were were allowed to to go 24 and I mean, that's what we're seeing we have 24 hour market offering that we launched last year with a small number of stocks and then we've rolled it out to over 900 as of now that that trade 24 hours a day five days a week and the liquidity here has improved over time.
So our entry into the market itself, uh, caused more market makers to express interest. It's caused exchanges to start looking at it as well because they want to make sure they're as competitive as possible with the ATSs. And, um, it's for sure going to happen, just, it's just a matter of time.
Logan: does that actually work at a at a technical level or practical level with the liquidity? Is it all self contained? within robin hood and the market makers that agree to to do it or Um
Vlad: that's open during the overnight session. So that's 8 p. m. to 4 a. m. Eastern. It's Blue Ocean ATS. And I think a big part of the challenge is our system has to move orders from different market centers sort of like seamlessly without the customer having to do it. And, um, yeah, it took a lot of, of time.
Like hardcore engineering [00:26:00] to get that right and to actually make it a seamless experience for customers Which is I think why you haven't seen others Copy that experience yet Even though it's taken a year because it's different than kind of matching us on pricing or doing promotions like here you're starting to see the benefit of vertically integrated stack and us hiring amazing software engineers and builders to build these products.
And I think that that's just going to compound over time as we keep adding more and more to our infrastructure.
Logan: the top 10 companies in the u. s. Make up a third I think of the u. s. Stock market I think microsoft alone is something like 678%. Uh, is, is this concentration that's occurred over the course of the last, I mean, it feels like probably 30 years that we've been headed in this direction, but, um, is this a good thing in, in your mind?
Is it, is it problematic? How do you think about it?
Vlad: I think it is a good thing to the extent That I mean, it's driven by free market forces, right? Free market forces, I think have worked effectively rather than central planning. And, um, I think it's, it's almost a similar point to concentration of wealth in the top X percent of the country, right? Is that good or bad?
Um, I think if it was the same companies and the same people decade after decade, um, That that would be something to look into and try to understand, but it's different companies I mean if you look back 30 years ago The list of the top 10 companies by market cap in the S& P is largely a different list.
I think There's the constant turnover and different companies Are sort of at the top of the list And I, I think, I view that as a sign of the vibrancy of the U. S. economy. And I [00:28:00] think things can be improved around the edges here and there. Like, I do think it should be easier to, uh, access private markets for, uh, retail investors, without having to deal with accreditation or all the red tape there.
Or companies should have more incentives to go public earlier, because Microsoft went public at a valuation of a hundred million, and then right now, you know. No company would go public at a valuation of a hundred million. At least there's adverse selection there. So, I think that's a problem for wealth creation, in particular for retail.
But, um, Yeah, I certainly wouldn't want to put my hand in the scale and arrange market caps of companies in a different way.
Logan: You mentioned short selling there. Uh, you don't allow it on the platform currently, right?
Vlad: Yeah,
Logan: Is, is, is that practical limit case limitations? Is it philosophical? Where, where do you come down on short selling for retail?
Vlad: yeah, um, yeah, I'm not, I'm not against it philosophically. I think actually that there is value in short selling in the market.
Logan: Not like Alex Carrp, who calls short sellers whatever, cocaine riddled, uh, wall Street traders or something.
Vlad: yeah, I, I don't agree with that. I think there's just like it. If you think about it, you're asking, should I be allowed to borrow? Your stock. Let's say you're long a particular company like should you be able to lend your shares to me? Well, sure, like why why why in a free society should we prevent you from lending your shares to someone?
Logan: And, and also, I mean, that's at a sort of philosophical, technical level. Yeah. But also it's, it exposes frauds that, uh, having people not just bet on the upside, but also the downside has lot of, uh, yeah. Good financial incentives for the free market to operate. Well, it's not [00:30:00] just downsides
Vlad: I think a lot of these guys that are just coming out. against short selling. It's because they don't like their stocks being shorted, right? So you have to, you have to kind of separate that out because they obviously are conflicted in there. It's, it's not a purely objective opinion. Um, there's just a long list of things that customers want.
I mean, they're asking us for tax lot selection and they're, they're sort of like a big bucket of table stakes features that other brokers offer that we don't that, that are critical. And, um, we're taking things from that bucket and. And making sure we prioritize them, but then we also want to make sure we don't just do that and we have a bunch of things that nobody else offers, like 24 hour market, for instance, that that we also want to want to do so.
We can't just be doing table stakes features. We have to do the right ones and couple them with. infrastructure improvements and innovative products that you can't find anywhere else.
Logan: How does AI change a business like Robinhood?
Vlad: So with AI, I think the my mental model for which products are successful is, um, is there something that another human is already doing for you that you're paying for? I think for those use cases, you can, uh, You can see AI playing a huge role or is there something that you're kind of begrudgingly doing yourself that You could kind of just like automate and streamline using using AI and there's some overlap between the two But in financial services, I mean there's there's things in that category like things in our industry that we use people for customer support is probably the most obvious example and But also, uh, a lot of financial advice is being delivered by RIAs person to person.
And I think, [00:32:00] um, AI can help augment that experience by just, uh, taking a lot of, like, the transactional relationship stuff and, and, uh, completely automating it.
Logan: Yeah, and so it actually, I mean, on one side that can make a better business in that, uh, what is required of people can now be done by, uh, AI in some way, but also as you bend the cost curve, it leads to more democratization, uh, and a lot of things philosophically that you guys have been championing for a long time.
Vlad: I get access to amazing financial advice and a lot of great service. And if we could take what someone like me has access to and give it to the mass market, I think that would be very, very powerful. And that's kind of the future that Robinhood is building towards. And AI is a big part of that. I mean, we've been hiring AI talent from when it was called machine learning.
now if you use that word, people laugh at you. He doesn't know what he's talking about. You just said machine learning. Can you believe that? But, um, Yeah, I think we were pretty early on those technologies and obviously now we have like generative AI and large language models, which is another flavor.
But, um, yeah, I think Robinhood will be the leader in AI for financial services and, um, that's one of my passions as a, um, mathematician and an engineer myself. I think, uh, You know, it's, it's, uh, there's just one company in financial services that I think has, uh, the right to win in that and that's Robinhood.
Logan: Uh, crypto, how have your views of crypto changed over time?
Vlad: Uh, I'm a, I'm a fan of strong encryption.
Logan: that's a very specific answer to, uh, cryptocurrency, I guess, uh, to, to lead you a little bit more. I, I actually heard you, and this is this a while ago, but I, I heard you say. This is five years ago that you were very pro crypto [00:34:00] currency themselves, but also you're early in saying, Hey, there's a lot of things being, uh, put on a blockchain that don't need to, and it can just be done with a database.
And so I think you had a very reason perspective at that point, uh, crypto currencies, uh, in general, that, that specific point, is there, uh, any way in which your view around that has changed over the course of the last five years?
Vlad: I think there's certainly more use cases. So I think five years ago, Bitcoin was, You know, not as accepted by the regulators. Now, we've kind of moved beyond Bitcoin and Bitcoin has sort of received a begrudging, maybe tacit acceptance. And we've moved it on to other coins like Ethereum and some of the others.
Um, And so Bitcoin very clear use case inflation hedge, you can see it very powerfully in countries that have seen incredible devaluation of their currencies. Um, you know, it's, it has product market fit there. You look at Turkey, some of the countries in South America, Venezuela, El Salvador. It's, it's been much more widespread stable coins.
Um, there, there's a huge use case in stable coins. And in fact, a lot of the volume nowadays in the market is stable coin volume. And you see sort of like market forces there too. Um, up until recently, and maybe it's still the case. USDT, so Tether Stablecoin on Tron was like the largest by transaction volume, just because the fees of sending dollars, uh, electronically, uh, over, over blockchains were incredibly low on Tron and you see a core need that people have there being met, which is people in these foreign countries want dollars, they want the cheapest way to transmit, store, and um, Send and receive [00:36:00] dollars, uh, and you know, crypto has facilitated that.
Um, and I think in the future you'll see that kind of stable coin use case, um, being applied to other assets as well. Like, why shouldn't we have stock on the blockchain? If you think about it, um, the costs of operating that service would be close to zero because it's all on public infrastructure. Um, You get 24 hour trading by default, you don't have to worry about everyone modernizing and dealing with all these companies and quasi regulators running on mainframes.
Fractionalization is built in and you have all these rich collateralized borrowing and lending protocols that, um, that, you know, run on software. So, you know, I, I've, I've been telling the team that look, we, we should take this incredibly seriously and be on the forefront of this technology because let's say that the crypto rails go to other assets like stocks and the cost of creating something like Robinhood falls basically to zero, three engineers could, could do it in a dorm room, uh, just writing some solidity code, um, That both should be a scary reality and an opportunity for us.
Um, And so I think like there's the regulatory side of this where the u. s is like decidedly anti but Um, you look at europe, for example, and europe has led in regulation there. Um, not surprisingly and you know the the european union has Not been traditionally the the best place for business to be done And they've sort of people make fun of us and I can say us because I'm both European and American So it's [00:38:00] it's it's kind of funny that like that's where there is clarity and then that's where innovation is going And I think that would be a shame if if the u.
s. Were to kind of seed that position because of are infighting here. Um, but yeah, you can look at Robinhood CryptoEU launching lots and lots of products that were just unable to launch here in the climate. And you know, as time goes on, the products that we offer in the EU will just deviate tremendously from the ones we can offer here.
And I think that's, that's really an unfortunate situation. I think it's incumbent on us in the industry to do what we can to reverse that. And that's why you're seeing us push for crypto clarity in the U. S. Um, yeah, by, by all of the means at our disposal.
Logan: What is cryptoclarity, um, like what is the end state? that you hope, because I mean, it seems like in some ways you could argue there is clarity. It just might not be the great, the answer people like, uh, you could argue, or what were you actually pursuing in terms of the, the clarity question?
Vlad: mean, I think there's various ways that you could get crypto clarity, um, in kind of a way that would, uh, sort of like satisfy us and the industry. Um, the SEC could issue rules. They have the power to, to issue rules and engage in rulemaking. And, um, and, uh, they, they could do that even without congressional action.
Uh, Congress could act as well and sort of compel, uh, the agencies to create rules or delineate what's the responsibility of the CFTC and what's the responsibility, uh, of the SEC. And right now they're not agreeing with each other. And I would say even the SEC in a lot of cases doesn't agree with [00:40:00] itself internally, depending on who you talk to, you get sort of like different opinions.
Um, so that that's not tenable. I mean, I think any clarity would be better than than what we have now.
Logan: Robinhood was certainly at the right place, right?
Logan: Time in the early days, uh, with, with an insight that you guys executed on. I'm curious, uh, there was a wait list that you, that you all, I think built up to. a million users, uh, or a million people waiting to get off the wait list at one point in time, I guess.
Was that a, um, intentional strategy or was that a infrastructure, like, uh, limitation just from a practical standpoint? How did you think about launching?
Vlad: it's both. I mean, one thing is we were kind of inspired by this company mailbox that probably you remember a email client, the first mobile first email client. Right. Had really nice, sort of like, swipe gesture, uh, that I think later on became standard and the Gmail app adopted them. But Dropbox ended up acquiring that company and I think I was using it till the very end when they shut the servers down.
But, uh, yeah, they had a really interesting waitlist experience on mobile that we sort of like, were inspired by and decided to take a little bit further. So from a design perspective, I think we stood on the shoulders of giants there. I think they did a really nice job.
Logan: So, so then the actual launch itself, how did you go about, uh, saying that you existed and sort of galvanizing people behind it? I
Vlad: We had worked on a couple of different products before. The Robin Hood wait list launched in December of 2013. One was a social networking app for traders. And we had this idea that, you know, it would take a while to get the broker dealer license. But until that point, we should actually build a community.
And the best way to do that would be to build a social network for traders where they could follow each [00:42:00] other, rate stocks, share news. And we were trying to grow this thing. You know, I was reading all the marketing tactics books and doing a B tests and experiments and things like that and nothing worked.
We got maybe a few thousand sign ups with a few hundred daily active users. Um, and when it came time to launch the Robin Hood wait list, we had our website up, our engineers were working on it. We just. Put it live. We put it on the internet without any gating or any concern to wait until the embargo. And we had done a little, we've talked to a couple of journalists.
We were planning a launch the following Thursday. And this was Friday night. And the last thing that occurred to us was that this thing was going to go viral on social media and we would end up having thousands of users because that just never happened to us. And with a year of like trying every growth tactic and AB test, I was unable to get anything to go viral.
So I just didn't think
Logan: think most companies should assume they're not going to go viral, uh, is probably a fair assumption as well.
Vlad: like, yeah, push the website live. We're launching next Thursday. Let's see if it works. And then, uh, I go home and I go to sleep. And I wake up on Saturday, and I get an alert from Google Analytics that there was 500 concurrents on the website. Which was an insane number, because we're used to like 5, right?
So it's 100x what we're used to. And I go on the Google Analytics to see what's going on, and I'm like, okay, I have to We forgot, like, the DDoS protection or something. Bots
Logan: attacking
Vlad: bots are attacking. And then I look, wait a minute. All these are coming from Hacker News. And I loved Hacker News.
I read it all the time. So I click on, on, uh, Hacker News to see what's going on. And I remember at the time, number one was Chinese landing on [00:44:00] the moon. Number two was Google acquires Boston Dynamics, the scary robotic dog company. Number three, Robinhood free stock trading. And I'm screenshotting the page and, you know, doing everything because I'm a big Hacker News reader and I didn't think we would go higher than number three.
But sure enough, 30 minutes later, we pass the moon landing and we're number one on Hacker News. And we probably get up to like a thousand concurrence and after I'm calling my parents and bragging to them and telling them, look, Hacker News, and they're, of course, like, what's Hacker News, tell me when you're on the on Forbes or something, right?
But we rush everyone into the office on Saturday and launch and we had to staple everything together like the emails weren't getting sent out. Just the basics weren't working because we thought we had plenty of time. And, uh, I had Josh Constine from TechCrunch calling me and saying, You violated embargo.
Like, how could you do it? And, uh, I was like, I'm sorry, dude. Like, I did not think that I would violate embargo or launch on a Saturday. But we ended up doing that. Uh, 10, 000 signups. The first day on a Saturday, 50, 000 in the first week and close to a million in the first year. So I think we, we just sort of like had the wind at our backs from the very beginning
Logan: So mobile was big. You guys were mobile only for a long time.
Vlad: a
Logan: yeah. And so, so, so mobile right place, right time, but zero transactions. It sounds like that was what went viral or at least, I mean, among the design and product choices, I'm sure you made that were very elegant, but that was people gravitated to that, that maybe caused it.
spike in the early days.
Vlad: That was a simple way to describe what the advantage was. Hey, you're paying 10 a trade. Robinhood offers it for free. And it's mobile first. I mean, people really like that. And actually that you can get started with. As little as you'd [00:46:00] like, most brokers at the time had account minimums, so you couldn't even open an account, uh, unless you were prepared to invest a thousand or sometimes even two thousand or more.
And, you know, we just made the decision about account minimums, I think, a week before announcement. It's like, we had to make the decision. Bejo and I got into the kitchen, we're like, alright, so what should the account minimums be? And, of course, we simultaneously came to the realization that they should be zero.
Why do we have them? Why do we need them? Oh, everyone else has them to avoid Having to service customers that are unprofitable. But our our uh, I mean our conclusion we heard that was we we want The pressure of having to serve every customer because then we'll use technology to make sure we can serve as many people as we can profitably.
And we want that pressure. We want there to constantly be an incentive for us to use technology to make our systems more and more efficient so that we can serve any type of customer.
Logan: And so now as you, you launched the gold card, when
Vlad: In March, we announced it. Yeah.
Logan: now it's in March. And, uh, what decisions did you make? Obviously there was an acquisition, which I want to talk about, but, but at the actual launch, what lessons 11 years later, uh, things did you do the exact same things you did differently in launching the gold card?
Vlad: Well, I, oh, there's, there's something really interesting about the gold card launch that I think reflects, um, something that is underappreciated about why we do wait lists. Um, and a lot of people say, oh, it's to create this feeling of exclusivity, the velvet rope and waiting in front of a club. That's like very exclusive, but really a lot of the times we make decisions, um, we have to make a decision about who we let onto the product first.
And what a typical sort of traditional financial firm would do is they'd look at who their [00:48:00] most profitable customers are, typically the ones with the most money in their accounts, and they would give access to the new stuff to them first. So they reserve the best for the wealthiest customers. And we always want there to be an option for someone that doesn't have any money, but is just like super passionate about the product and the brand to get access first.
And that's why, um, the referral mechanism around the solid gold card is 10 referrals. Uh, typically, if you, if, if someone rolled out a solid gold card, it would be at a high net worth, right? We want people with a lot of money to be valued customers. And of course, we love those customers, but we also want that college kid who maybe doesn't have a lot of money yet, but just cares a lot about using the technology and supporting Robinhood to have an equal shot at being one of the first to get this card.
And so, that's why we have these referral incentives, because not everyone has millions of dollars, but, um, You know, most people can find some friends to, to share the value of Robin Hood with, and you can do that if you don't have any money.
Logan: I was with Sam Altman earlier this week and he was very proud of his gold card. I'll, uh, as a flag,
Vlad: Did he show it to you?
Logan: he whipped it out and he was like, wait, we making small talk after he's like, what, what are you, what are you doing this week? I was like, Oh, I'm going down to see Vlad. He's like, ask him about the gold card.
And he pulled it out, showed it to me, showed his version of it. He was very, uh, proud. So, uh, a, uh, an honest plug from a satisfied user. I think he falls in probably the former camp of the high net worth, uh, users than the democratized users. But nonetheless, he was, he was very excited about it.
Vlad: Oh, you should have, you should have asked him to take it out on the show and drop it.
Logan: Yeah, you know
Vlad: that's
Logan: that would been very good branding actually at a nice commercial. But, uh, yeah, this will have to do as a plug for it in making the decision to go after, uh, like credit card. So, so you made an acquisition [00:50:00] 18 months ago, uh, 90 maybe.
Vlad: 12 months ago. Yeah. Less than
Logan: so 12 months ago, he made an acquisition.
Logan: The name of the business was
Vlad: X one.
Logan: one, uh, 95 million cash, right? And you had been user of the product for Before, and it's not like maybe, uh, I mean this complimentary, but like a nerd of credit cards in, in trying new ones. And this one that you gravitated to maybe, maybe take me through the journey of like deciding to launch a credit card
Vlad: I mean, I think that from the, from relatively close to the beginning of Robinhood, we had this vision of not just helping you with investing and trading, but all of your financial needs and the idea behind scaling the Robinhood brand to other products. Is really, um, I mean, I think it does scale because a Robinhood product, regardless of the category, should have best in class pricing and best in class user experience, particularly on mobile.
And I think if you look at financial services across the board, not just trading, um, Wealthy customers have access to tools and services that other people just don't have access to and technology can level the playing field there and make it so that we make these products and services available to everyone.
And that's the idea behind Robinhood, you know, taking the products and services that, uh, A high net worth individual would be able to get through your private wealth manager or, you know, chase private client experience and putting it in the hands of everyone. And for most of that, you could, you could do with a Robinhood Gold subscription, which is as little as 5 a month, which I think is, is really amazing.
I mean, can you imagine were we to deliver this? A private high net worth experience for just five dollars a month I think that would resonate [00:52:00] with hundreds of millions of people worldwide
Logan: so that that ties into the mission and the value prop and the how you think about products for Robin Hood. But, um, so credit cards were a specific, uh, one. And you mentioned most Americans spend money on it. So at what point did it start becoming something that, hey, we're going to go down this path. And then how do you make the decision to build versus buy?
Vlad: you know, we considered going down the path in 2019 you know, we uh Announced a product that was basically a neo banking product called robinhood cash management, which was a high yield on your cash plus a debit card and I think the Uh We learned a lot about how to operate a card program, how to deal with sort of the fraud and the chargebacks and the disputes through that.
And we got a lot of familiarity with the space. But what we realized is, um, the economics on credit cards were just So strong, um, that once an American gets their first credit card, they, they typically stay with their majority of spend on credit. And once you have enough money to invest, you tend to be in that credit primary bucket.
So actually the bulk of our customers, the most engaged ones were credit card primary already. And, uh, and so, We still have our credit card or we have the debit card product, and I think that's a good entry point for, uh, for certain customers, but in order to be competitive and to kind of recreate the Robin Hood formula of industry leading economics and industry leading user experience.
We had to, we had to get into the credit card business.
Logan: And then, uh, acquiring versus, uh, building from scratch. How'd you land on X1 as the best path?
Vlad: Um, I'd say we tend [00:54:00] to prefer to build things in house, but we always have a really long list of things that are on the roadmap. I mean, if you, if you just think about the vision of delivering every financial product and service, custodying all of our customers assets and processing all their financial transactions, that basically touches every financial product.
Uh, and I think if we. built it ourselves, we'll probably get there within 10 years. But, um, you know, the, the Corp dev team is always on the lookout for great teams with amazing talent, strong engineering and design chops, uh, that we can partner with. And, you know, when we, we had been talking to X one for a long time, and last year we had the SVB led banking crisis, which made it a very, very challenging environment for bank lending.
Which made it a challenging environment for startups like x1 which relied relied on that to grow their business and and so it was an opportune time where we could find an amazing team that we we knew somewhat well and I think for them the value prop was strong because we have the balance sheet. We care about Uh, just as much about design and user experience and engineering as they did, the, the kind of founding DNA of the companies was the same.
I mean, we're all Stanford grads who, uh, were highly technical. And, uh, When we saw that there was an opportunity, we thought we could meaningfully accelerate the launch of the credit card, which we ended up doing. I think if we had gone through it the organic path, I mean, it would have taken much longer.
Logan: Hm. Uh, how did you actually go about, like, um, in acquiring them? How many people did they have at the time?
Vlad: Maybe around 50?
Logan: Fifty. And you have fifty people that you need to figure out. Did you leave them, uh, [00:56:00] alone and let them rebrand? Uh, what was the shared infrastructure behind the scenes to make sure it's interoperable?
Like, how did you actually think about integrating it so it could get to market as quickly as it did?
Vlad: Yeah.
Vlad: I mean, by and large, we left them alone and mid 2022, we transitioned the company to a GM structure where instead of having all the functions rolling into me, like engineering product design, um, we have a couple of platform teams and several GMs. And so that was also opportune because Deepak just became the GM of credit cards.
Deepak's the CEO of X one. Um, Which we called Robinhood Money, uh, and it incorporates the debit card business and the money transmitter licenses that, that we already had. And so it was, it was actually very simple, like the X1 team. Coupled with a few Robinhood folks that were operating the, the money business just, uh, turned into, uh, the money team
Logan: It sounds like that that was probably in process absent the acquisition. How do you about
Vlad: about a year before.
Logan: year before, how do you think about the tradeoffs of having like a GM that owns, I assume they have a full team, engineers on their team, products, design, all that stuff versus, um, yeah, having it roll up into, in a more functional manner.
Vlad: Yeah, I think by and large, uh, the, the benefits have been very, very strong for Robinhood. What we've gained is the GMs like live and breathe the products they care about the PNL They're like super accountable and you know, they're They feel a ton of pressure over the entire success of the business including the PNL and that just Wasn't the same in the functional structure Of course, to some degree, the product leaders felt the success, [00:58:00] but, uh, you know, engineering was responsible for building it.
Product was responsible for building a great product and partnership with design and research. The finance partners were responsible for the PNL. So there wasn't anyone. Really except me that really felt the the weight of the pnl um, or at least that's how it felt to me and Once there were three or four product lines that were separable um, yeah, it just it it seemed like sharding that out and decentralizing the the accountability and the responsibility
Logan: Kind of empowers entrepreneur, an entrepreneurial nature.
Logan: And, and, and I assume, I mean, the risk, the trade offs of, of that, I assume are, could be cultural, uh, that they start to be very different cultural values within the money team versus the trading team versus the, and I, I, I, I can imagine there's also, I don't know, different hiring considerations and, uh, probably a bunch of other, uh, trade offs in that.
How do you, how do you mitigate against some of the downsides? You
Vlad: uh, some of the biggest trade offs are um You You know, when, when, when you think about the brand, it's very important to the customer. Because, you know, customers get inundated with lots and lots of different messages. There's only so many things that you can remember at any given point, especially about a company.
So for Robinhood to sound and look and feel the same, Regardless of whether you're dealing with the brokerage, the crypto business, the credit card is extremely important. And so the way we mitigate that is design remains centralized, marketing remains centralized, and we have a core product team that's responsible for for the design of the app.
And, you know, Related, but maybe not as directly to brand engineering standards, [01:00:00] that's important to keep the same. So having a core infrastructure team with responsibility with some responsibility in making sure that there's sort of like consistent standards applied throughout engineering is how we handle that.
And of course, the cost is then there's tension and conflict between the platform teams and the GMs, which oftentimes fall on me to mitigate, but at least those are conscious conflicts that by and large make the company better because sometimes GMs want to move fast and be independent and the design team will say, hold on, like what you're doing is not consistent with What the brokerage team or the credit card team is doing so we'll have to slow down and kind of redo that.
Logan: lot of customers, a lot of end users, uh, and there's a lot of, um, uh, ways in which you guys innovate on, um, uh, monetization models and incentives and, hey, 1 percent match or cash back or all this stuff.
Logan: How do you How do you think that through as you're doing this like perspective modeling in the future about like LTVs of customers or the CAC to acquire the stickiness?
Is there a centralized team responsible for thinking through all that? And then what is the time horizon that you map things like credit cards being profitable to the overall business or what are the inputs into that?
Vlad: Yeah. Um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's a partnership. Finance obviously owns the financial model. Marketing owns kind of the CAC to LTV calculations. But of course, finance kind of shakes hands and agrees on what the, Yeah. CAC and LTV actually are. They're the source of truth. Data science provides sort of like, uh, Dashboarding and [01:02:00] machine learning infrastructure to, to those teams, uh, as well.
But yeah, we're, we're extremely rigorous about all of that stuff. I mean, we have people that really, really care about making sure the numbers and the economics are Are correct and actually like nailed down and we've got we have hearty debates about all aspects of this.
Logan: And then it flows up into like, I mean, now that you're a public company, you can't be wrong on these things of, I mean, obviously there's some forgiveness in that, but like these, the modeling, like you said, expectations and people expect you to go hit it. So I assume it's pretty rigorous and how you guys go about it.
Vlad: Yeah. I mean, we try to be conservative in the modeling for that reason and end up in situations where we can be surprised to the upside. So we consciously, I mean, have various. variations, bear case, standard bull case, like very, very bullish case. Typically the GMs, you know, look at the very bullish case and finance has to kind of keep them honest and look at the bear case.
Um, but yeah, I think being conservative and having ways that we can, uh, having like levers under our control. So for example, the match promotions, we, we kind of knew that. Uh, when we rolled it out, we would learn a lot by having it just be available for contributions to retirement accounts like that would give us a lot more data.
And the first launch with retirement of a Robin Hood match program was just on contributions. So, uh, it was 1 percent and, um, it was really capped out at your contribution limit, which is 7000 per year. So even if. You know, our assumptions were wrong, which knock on wood, they ended up being being right. Uh, the downside was small.
And then once we got confidence, we realized, Hey, [01:04:00] uh, using this data, 1 percent match on rollovers and ACATs, which is people bringing large sums of money from brokerages starts to, to make sense too. And we tried that and it worked very, very well. And then, uh, we figured out that. Hey, the economics are so good that 1 percent is not optimal for gold 3 percent is better And then we did that that worked very very well.
So now we're bringing it to the taxable account
Logan: so it's kind of an incrementality of like mitigating the risk as you sort of figure out the data points and what the implications are going to be as you broaden
Vlad: yeah, at the end of the day, it's you know, it's a data science problem measurable and Yeah, I think And we've been, we've been iterating with it and learning as we, as we go along.
Logan: It seems like you guys have, uh, moved back to in person. I, uh, I, uh, walking through the office today, it's probably more people I've seen in your office than any, uh, office I've been in in the last couple of years. A
Vlad: I appreciate that. That a
Logan: Are you guys, it's you, I asked, I asked someone on the way and I go, are you, are you guys in the office every day?
And they go, no, just Monday to Friday. And I was like, okay, that, that's what I meant. Uh, but, but I appreciate that attitude that, uh, you know, the weekends that people are allowed to work from home.
Vlad: Yeah. Well, there's one thing really interesting about that, which is that, um, in, I think it was January of 2022, we made a big hoopla of being a remote first company. So you know, up until that point, we were kind of hedging our stance. We said, well, we'll be flexible to people's needs. We'll continue to reevaluate.
And then January of 2022. We were like, all right, let's, let's just like make a decision here and announce we're remote first company. And I think as soon as, um, that blog post went out, I was like, Oh God, I made a terrible mistake here. Uh, this is not, this is not good. I felt bad about it. Um, and then the, uh, [01:06:00] the feedback I heard when we decided to go back into the office was not only has no other company managed to get their people back into the office successfully, While hedging and saying that we're not remote first, they didn't know anyone.
It was like much, much harder that we announced we were remote first and then we wanted to change our minds.
Logan: And how did you, a lot of companies I think are in this limbo period still, maybe more six months ago, 12 months ago, but how did you guys successfully navigate the, the going back in person, uh, without. Sounds like too much uproar from an employee standpoint.
Vlad: I think explaining the why of things is important. Um, I don't know a lot, a lot of people just have fear of doing it. I think, uh, you know, you, you talk to people that want their employees in person and I come across these entrepreneurs and I ask, well, What have you announced publicly and a lot of times they just aren't very direct And I think we very directly said I'd like people to come in person.
I think it's better for collaboration I think that we do a lot of important work across functions and You know, you have to have answers for all the concerns that people have that I think are reasonable I mean some people are gonna say You Uh, well, we've got people all around the world, they've moved, nobody that I work with is, nobody from my team is, is in my office.
So, why, why would I come in? And, I think the, the answer to that is, everyone in this company is on your team. shouldn't just engage with people. On your team, because what happens if you need to talk to someone from compliance or legal if you're an engineer and having those relationships are extremely important, having some awareness for what people are doing is important, and I think that's something that's very difficult to manufacture [01:08:00] in the remote world.
I mean, people are very efficient with their time and they have to be because you have to kind of delineate. Uh, at home time with work time and you delineate that, of course, through meetings. Um, but then,
Logan: Tactically on that point though, did you draw like a radius around, hey, if you can commute, if you're currently living within whatever an hour's commute of Menlo Park, then you're going to be in, in person or how did you, or did you say people, Hey, above this level, you have to move here. Like, I'm sure you hired people that were in Utah or Seattle or New York or Florida or whatever.
Like, how did you sort of put the toothpaste back in the tube?
Vlad: yeah, and I think in those cases, we're very understanding. I mean, if you actually lived far away, then we wouldn't make you come in. But most people actually clustered around locations where we have offices anyway. And, uh, up until, uh, January of 22, we were hiring people within radius of, of offices.
So, uh, very little hiring happened, uh, outside of those in the first And that was the good part about it. We weren't Remote first for very long the period where we were remote first and we were hiring aggressively was was pretty short.
Logan: You've, um, since you've been public, you've, you've had to deal with swings and stock prices for Robin Hood, the, the business, and, uh, and you guys raised a bunch of money in the private markets as well, uh, managing employee expectations more than investor expectations. I think investors on the, at least the public markets are familiar with different swings in stock prices, but, uh, Employee expectations.
What have you learned about sort of, um, do you guys not look at the stock price? Do you guys Encourage people to look at it once a month. Uh, like how do you sort of manage this internally?
Vlad: yeah, I think that that was the advice that I got before we went public, you know Everyone calls you and says hey, I have one piece of advice Don't focus on the stock price and [01:10:00] I think it's it's great advice in theory But if you look at the types of products that we offer and what Robin Hood is it's just unrealistic for us It's like it's like As you're using the product and working on it, it's hard to escape stock prices of various things, including Robinhood.
Um, so that doesn't always work for us. I still tell people not to focus on it. And I think we've been through so many instances where it does something one day and then the next day it does the complete opposite. I mean, we went public, uh, at 38 a share and closed down on day one of trading, I think we closed that low thirties and there were all these news articles saying, you know, this is the worst IPO of all time, right?
And then two days later. The stock went to like 75. Um, and so once you go through that a couple of times, then you kind of realize that it's, it's a little bit silly to like try to interpret one day stock moves as, uh, any statement of the company. And I think what, what I found is most effective is to constantly remind people what the strategy is and make sure the strategy is supported by.
Really exciting products that people can look forward to and you know, whether it's the the credit card advisory retirement International expansion. I mean you you don't have to like work very hard to convince people that If we execute on these things, and if they're as good as we believe we can make them, then that's going to transform the, the profile of the company and the value of the company should follow.
And I think in the past year, you're starting to see that, I mean, uh, our [01:12:00] strategy, no, nobody, I think the market didn't have a ton of confidence a year ago that we would be able to pivot from speculative trading. You know, we had launched retirement, but. You know, there were questions about would, would people trust Robinhood with their retirement savings at any significant scale and rolling out those products, having the retirement product win a design award, um, having the credit card come out and you, you've seen it.
Um, I, I believe in a lot of people would agree with me that it's the most iconic credit card ever released solid gold, simple design. I mean, it's just, it looks beautiful. And I think that the team has done a great job. Um, I wouldn't be surprised if, if we get design awards for that credit card too. So it's, it's really a, a very, very nice product inside and out from the infrastructure all the way through to the user experience of the app to the design, uh, in a big market.
You know, we, uh, we think there's a ton of confidence in the product suite, the strategy. And I think that that gets reflected in an employee sentiment. I think that ultimately everyone wants to work at a company that's doing cool things, rolling out disruptive products. And, um, to some degree, people are here because they believe in the mission of giving access to the mass market, uh, to these awesome tools.
Logan: What about hiring through? Uh, I mean at one point Probably I think it's safe to say there was a point in the private markets in which you would have been Quote unquote the hottest company that people wanted to work I think it's probably You Fair to say if we like, I would have to think harder about the different points in time along the way.
Uh, and so that probably, you probably got a lot of inbound on the candidate side, but also maybe led to, um, employees that, uh, or prospective employees that were less interested in the mission and maybe more interested in the coolness. the business and and and then there was a point in time of, [01:14:00] you know, we talked through the brand impact and all that and so I'm sure it was harder for for for recruiting or the implications were a little different, I guess, in finding people and hiring people that are aligned with the long term vision.
Are there anything that you've been able to find or tease out in the interview process? Uh, make people long term successful here.
Vlad: yeah. I mean, um, I think it's a really good question. Your point is a good one that there was a time period in which probably a lot of people came to Robin Hood because they thought it would look great on, on their resume, right? Um, you know, they, they wanted to join a great company that was growing really quickly and was about to go public and the motivations of joining a growing company.
Whose valuation was going way, way up and was about to go public were probably greater than the actual work that people were doing in terms of what provided them with fulfillment. And what happened was, um, you know, a lot of those folks were unhappy when things got challenging, right after, you know, we did go public and we had kind of the reset and the broader market and in our stock.
And, um, Yeah, it became clear, not just to us, but to those folks that this probably wasn't, wasn't a great fit. And, um, conversely, when, like, times were difficult and we had to actually, like, go through an excruciating 2022, where we made lots of difficult decisions and ended up reversing things that we had put in place that we thought were great ideas, like remote work.
Um, some of the people that joined in those times were, were actually incredibly good because they not only cared about [01:16:00] the mission because you wouldn't join a company whose stock is, you know, the stock price has been chopped by a factor of two or three and it's post IPO unless you really care about the mission and unless you actually like really care about fixing things, um, And at the same time, we challenged ourselves that we didn't want to lower our hiring bar.
In fact, we wanted to raise our hiring bar even more. And, you know, there were There were some folks that were worried, like, could we hire great people, uh, in this environment? And it turned out, like, we, we hired amazing people. And there, there are just people that want to work here because their, their life's mission is actually, like, giving underserved folks and folks that didn't have the opportunity access to financial services.
They were users of the Robinhood product. A lot of times, Robinhood got them into investing when they were in college. And I think that's an advantage that we have over other companies in the valley. Not many other companies share our specific mission and you get people that are that are very interested in that that want to join.
Logan: What have you learned about fundraising? I guess in the private markets more so than the public's, but picking a VC partner and all that. Any, any advice there?
Vlad: Um, yeah. I mean, it's, it's something that I miss sometimes fundraising in the public markets is very different. I mean, you don't really do fundraising, but you go to these investor conferences where you can't really share any projections or anything non public. It's just, Really commentary on what the business has already done and some color on results that you've already Already released and to me.
I think one of my skills was by the end of it I got very good at raising capital in the private markets I mean, I think we raised something like seven billion [01:18:00] dollars something like that through the life of the company and it's It started off with a few hundred thousand in the seed round and then got up to a few million and, um, sort of, we, we, I think we got a lot better at telling the long term vision and communicating just how ambitious the, the, um, the goals of the company were, um, but yeah, private fundraising, um, Yeah, I think we were pretty effective at it
Logan: What think you particularly well besides growing fast and, you know, have it telling a big story? Was there anything that, uh, you, you learned tactically that you would impart to people?
Vlad: I mean, I think the biggest thing is delivering the goods, right? Um, a lot of our investors that ended up leading subsequent rounds came in in sort of a reduced capacity in earlier rounds. So, uh, for example, Index, who led our big Series A, entered in the seed round with a smaller check, right? And they got to know the company.
Uh, they got to see us operate and then they were there when, you know, we were, we were, uh, about to do our A and they ended up preempting that round. Um, Ribbit also came in the A in a smaller capacity, but then, uh, ended up leading several rounds later on. DST, uh, Rahul and Yuri were, uh, personal investors in the B round.
And then they got to know us, they got to know how we operated, and then ended up leading the C, D, and E um, which was amazing. I mean, they've only done that with a couple of other companies, uh, who have all done tremendously well. So, uh, part of it is making sure that you're talking to the right investors who actually are aligned and care about the right things.
But I think another part is just, [01:20:00] Delivering the goods and saying articulating a plan and actually like sticking to that plan and delivering and over delivering on it And I think to some extent that's kind of what we're seeing in the public markets as well I mean that that thing is the same um, we are kind of communicating the strategy the strategy is one that maybe public markets have to see Executed well before they believe it, but now you're starting to see it resonating and us actually delivering the goods And I think up until now We've seen that have have an effect and and drive the valuation of the company in a in a reasonable way So, you know to your original question, I think day to day The markets are driven by like systematic high frequency trading by and large So it's hard to separate out the signal there But over the long run It has been remarkably consistent and sort of somewhat predictable in hindsight
Logan: move from New York to California with The founding of Robin Hood. Is that right? Or
Vlad: a little bit before yeah But yeah, it was around the same time.
Logan: Are there elements of New York culture that you tried to bring into Robin Hood? Or did you guys try to be a very, I don't know, Silicon Valley first principles in, in the way that we think about the ethos and all this stuff historically?
Vlad: Ooh Yeah, that's an interesting question. Um, I really loved my time in new york. I mean you live in new you you know, uh,
Logan: You don't need to pitch
Vlad: You know the story there. Um Yeah, I thought it was just a great experience for me personally, um, but sort of as a creative human wanting to make something, um, I found it very, very distracting.
I mean, I lived in the East Village. There was a bar in the first floor of my building that was open till 4 [01:22:00] a. m. every single night, There was this scene in New York, probably still the case, where You know, people start partying on Thursdays because they want to miss the crowds on Friday. So there was just this constant magnetism that I think made it distracting to work.
And I think that's why when we moved to California, I not only wanted to move to California, but I was like, I don't want to be in a city. I want to be in this quiet little suburb, right? Because, you know, you get, you get off work. There's really no bars, nothing's open past 9pm. Um, you can go home and, and sleep and be well rested and get back to work.
And I think that the environment here and the space that it gives you, at least for me, made it much easier to be creative. Um, So I loved being there. I thought it was like a great social environment. I made a lot of lifelong friends and I had a lot of fun, but I don't think that for an early stage startup, even in financial services, we, it would have worked as well for us.
Logan: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm going to insert some New York propaganda, uh, as, as pushback, I guess, depending on what you heard there, uh, I, I guess it's sort of, uh, in the eye of the beholder, uh, that you can come to San Francisco and have less going on and be less distracted, or you can be in, uh, in New York and have more going on and potentially more distractions.
And so I guess people need to pick which is the right path for, uh, for them at a personal level.
Vlad: I think that's true. Yeah. I mean, one of the early products that I used a lot in New York was four square. I mean, I think that's one of the few, at least at that time, that was one of the few technology startups that actually. Had broad appeal that was headquartered in New York. And if you think about that product, uh, it was for a New York use case, which is you're going out at night with your friends.
Um, [01:24:00] there's like 17 bars, right? And you don't want to keep texting them. Oh, I left this place and I'm at this other place. Oh, I left this other place. Now I'm here. You could just check in and
Logan: going to sound old. Foursquare was a app. When you go into a restaurant or bar location, you would check in and it would alert your friends around you that you were there, which made a ton of sense in New York. This is you were probably 2009 when I was there using it. You tell your friends that were around the corner.
Hey, I'm at this bar and I still think there's probably a use case by my friends probably addresses some of that case today. But
Vlad: think it became commoditized and inserted into every
Logan: Yeah, now just take an Instagram story picture or something. It sort of, uh, assesses or does the same thing. Um, on the recruiting side and assessing talent, has there been anything, um, any questions that you ask or, uh, uh, types of things you look for in employees that might be different than You know, anyone else might, might sort for or questions they might ask
Vlad: that's interesting. I don't know if you're going to get an honest answer to that question. Nobody's going to give up their
Logan: their trick. I don't know. Your culture is going to be different than other people's culture. For example, I found, um, we really, uh, uh, need to hire people with chips on their shoulder. Uh, and sometimes that. The flip side of that is you can get people that might have sharp elbowed or might, uh, be overly competitive or have a desire to prove and need to take credit.
So there can be downsides to it. But our job is so abstract in some ways that, um, if you're not, self motivated, you feel a lot of, uh, a lack of fulfillment because the day is just so incremental. And so unless you, you have some broad desire to prove something, uh, it's, you know, it's going to be hard to fill your calendar with stuff.
At least that's what I found. I'm sure other venture firms might say something slightly [01:26:00] differently.
Vlad: yeah, I would say one of the unique things about me that I care about that I think are probably rare in certainly financial services is, um, uh, I look for people that are earlier career and maybe higher potential but haven't proven themselves yet and people with high mathematical talent because, um, I remember my own experience, I was a math undergrad from Stanford And, um, you know, I, I felt like I had a lot of potential, right?
Um, I had a lot of confidence. I did really well in my classes. I did like pure math research, which I consider to be very, very hard, but, um, I, I wasn't very employable. I didn't really get any job offers out of undergrad because everyone would ask me, like, What are the practical skills of all this pure math work that you did and studied and, you know, most employers are looking for like demonstrated close alignment with your specific skills that you've learned in college classes and the job.
And, um, the reality of it was like I could learn most of those things given short enough time. And I think my observation when I started actually recruiting people was I'd like to bet on those people. If you're just like really, really smart and high horsepower and you've had a history of doing challenging things and succeeding at them, then, um, in some cases, even if you don't know how to, Code in Python, uh, we'll, we'll give you a shot and see if we can help you learn that skill here.
So I, I think Robinhood's a great place for early career people and people in hard sciences and mathematics, even if they have zero financial services experience.
Logan: In, uh, letting people go, uh, is there anything that, in a company at this size, inevitably you've had to [01:28:00] let people go either through, for, for whatever circumstance, is there anything you've learned about how to do that in a way that's, um, leads to the best outcome either for the business or for the individual?
Vlad: I think it's true that every company, um, does it too slowly. I mean, some companies don't, but by and large, uh, I think that, you know, the, The decision to let someone go once you made it, I think, should be, like, executed quickly because it's not fair to the person and to the team to keep it going much longer.
And I think it, what's maybe underappreciated is that it frustrates the team because, You know, if the team's like working super hard and motivated and there's one or two people that maybe, maybe aren't, or for whatever reason, they're not gelling with the team, then you have to worry about their morale and so it's a responsibility to, to those team members for managers to, um, to make those decisions as quickly as possible.
And I think one of the things to look at at the, um, Sort of macro level is is the company machinery? Incentivizing making it very very difficult to let people go once the decision is clear And I think in a lot of cases company machinery built up to correct to sort of over correct in that direction and We've built up these tools especially through the kovat era to sort of like You Protect employees against managers that are overzealous.
And I think that went to an extreme degree. And, you know, what we've been trying to do is to just sort of eliminate the Uh, eliminate the, the blockers there and make it so that we have as little bureaucracy as [01:30:00] possible for, for managers to act.
Logan: Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a good point. No one regrets. Uh, I've never heard someone really regret letting someone go, which by definition means always doing it too, too late. And there's a clip of a college football coach Nick Saban referencing like mediocre people hate high achievers and higher high achievers hate mediocrity they just don't.
work well together, both end up dissatisfied with the other. And so it's something that I found once you reach that conclusion, just riffing the band aid. If there's any doubt seeping into your mind, you probably know the answer if you really ask yourself the question. So it's just hard to do. Too many nature not to do it too quickly.
You want to get people out.
Vlad: yeah. Yeah. I, I think that's right. Um, and you certainly don't want, you know, decisions, uh, or concerns about sort of like getting sued to overwhelm. Uh, and, and just make it difficult to, to do that across the board
Logan: Um, Sherwood, media subsidiary of Robinhood. You launched that when?
Vlad: couple of weeks ago.
Logan: A couple weeks ago. Okay, so, so it evolved from, so snacks you've had for a while. I maybe, maybe take me through the evolution of, of having a media subsidiary.
Vlad: Yeah, so it really started with Robinhood Snacks, um, which was a podcast plus newsletter. Uh, I think actually by some metrics, the number one financial newsletter in the world. I think we have something like 40 plus million subscribers.
Logan: And was that organic, or did you guys acquire?
Vlad: We acquired, uh, Jack and Nick from MarketSnacks. Which, uh, started the, a podcast, um, but yeah, the, the newsletter really grew within Robinhood because it was bootstrapped with the Robinhood customer growth we've [01:32:00] had over the years. So, um, yeah, I think the, the newsletter readership was, was largely built here.
Um, and so the, the first step was how can we actually take this large readership and, um, Turn that into a, into a broader media property.
Logan: And the thought process on that, obviously, like, Bloomberg, there's some precedent of, of other folks doing it. But was that you were uniquely passionate about? Did you look at, hey, Bloomberg's done this, and so, you know, it seems like a decent enough comp to follow? Or how'd you even think about it from a grassroots standpoint?
Vlad: Yeah, I think the way we think about it is, um, Bloomberg started with the technology product, the terminal and built a differentiated media platform offering on the back of that. And if you think about Robin hood as kind of the Bloomberg terminal for the mass market, everyone has a Bloomberg terminal in your pocket.
Can we do a similar thing for that audience? And so we, we brought on, uh, Josh Topolsky, who actually used to run media at Bloomberg and started The Verge and Vox Media as well. And, uh, I think we both shared this vision and, of course, Robin Hood had the resources to execute on this. And, uh, and he got excited about building that here.
And so, yeah, a lot of, uh, media companies have been struggling recently. And we've had just, uh, An amazing time hiring amazing talent, bringing them on here. And so far, we, we like the results. Yeah, the goal is to, like, be number one in this space. And, and it's a long game. We know we have a lot of, a lot of work to do.
But the audience has been growing. We're seeing more and more people hitting the site and sharing our articles. And so I, I think we, we have the ingredients for something really special here.
Logan: How directly do you try to tie the ROI [01:34:00] as someone with an ethereal, uh, ROI media property that I can't totally tie ROI to? Do you, are you guys able to get like click through rates and sign up conversions and all of that on it? Or is it more a, uh, a vision bet and, uh, share a voice and you just sort of measure it on its own and know that it's doing its own thing?
Vlad: the goal isn't to cross sell Sherwood readership into Robin Hood at this stage. It's really just growing Sherwood readership independently, uh, by, by producing great content and it's independently, uh, monetized using advertising, but we also don't need to be as aggressive and explore subscription models and pay walls.
So, I mean, one of the things that is super annoying about financial news now is you can't even read it. You know, you're, you're getting paywalled all over the place, the ads are really obtrusive, and I think one very easy thing for us to do is, since we don't have to uh, Rely on Sherwood exclusively for monetization.
Uh, we can be as unobtrusive as as possible and make sure people are seeing the content and that it's, it's available broadly to the mass market.
Logan: It feels like at least right now you're not trying to do journalistic endeavors. Like there's not as much a. editorial, I mean, there is editorial associated with it, but, but there's not this church and state need to cover and how you break news. And, you know, does that go against a certain part of the audience as well?
Or is there that, that editorial decision of what kind of content fits in to it that is tied into the business or separate from the business?
Vlad: it, we, we want to keep it as separate as possible. Um, we want to be as truth seeking as possible, uh, as well. Um, but. Yeah, we, we're doing real journalism, like we want to do scoops, breaking news, investigative [01:36:00] journalism.
Logan: Oh, I didn't realize that. You're doing all of that,
Vlad: Yeah, I think we can go super deep and like do creative things to understand how specific companies operate.
So, uh, yeah, and we, we've been hiring really, really good journalists, uh, across the board.
Logan: Wow, that's super interesting. I was curious, and I meant to ask this earlier. Have you still really not seen Dumb Money?
Vlad: I saw a few clips of it. The ones that I
Logan: right? you've seen your portion of the movie, but not the totality?
Vlad: I didn't, I haven't watched the whole thing end to end.
Logan: Is, is that a, is that like A-P-T-S-D, uh, or is it a Hey, you don't like the, the concept of calling it dumb money? Uh, from a nomenclature standpoint, I don't
Vlad: like that. for sure. Um, yeah. And it's, it's, uh, I mean, it's, it's a little bit offensive to me and probably also, I don't understand how it's not offensive to the retail investors to just be called dumb money
Logan: didn't seem to do that. Well, I guess, uh, so may maybe, maybe people did find it, uh, offensive.
Vlad: Yeah, but I would say, like, they got my mannerisms kind of right.
Logan: Is that right?
Vlad: I mean, a lot of people When, when, you know, the movie comes up, they're like, Oh, you must hate that. It was terrible. It was completely wrong. I think the substance was wrong and the interactions were wrong, but I think they just have seen enough videos of me and how I move my hands.
And I don't know that, you know, I, I enjoyed seeing the, the mannerisms actually.
Logan: Is that just a surreal thing to think that you started a financial trading app and now there's like a mainstream Wall Street movie, uh, that of which you're a character? Is that like a weird thing to, uh, think about or when it was coming out?
Vlad: I didn't really take it super seriously or I didn't think it was a big deal. I mean, part of it is the [01:38:00] movie. It's not like it won an Oscar. Um, so, um, I think I've been in documentaries and the media enough to not have been totally blown away by that. But, um, what, what, what it kind of makes me think of is Man, I would love for there to be a better movie, a really good one that we're in and
Logan: Better in terms of quality, uh, not just portrayal, but also just like, uh, yeah, better tomato scores.
Vlad: just like a maybe a movie that covered the Robin Hood story or the broader retail investor movement Um,
Logan: Listen, sure. Sure would. Sure would. Uh, honestly, I mean, who knows, right? Who knows where this media entity is going to take you guys.
Vlad: yeah, and uh, I I think it's just incumbent on us to Deliver more good products and keep changing the industry and maybe there will be another movie at some point
Logan: As you look back, like, 11 years in, I'm sure all the GameStop stuff was, uh, whatever, a weird experience, and the IPO, I'm sure, was a very exuberant experience and all that. Is there any anecdote outside of those, uh, along the journey that you reflect on and just sort of seems surreal? In hindsight, either access to someone that you couldn't believe you got access to, or an experience that you look back on with some level of nostalgia, um, that, that maybe wasn't portrayed in a movie, or you don't think about the ticker day parade of an IPO.
Yeah, yeah.
Vlad: I really actually enjoyed the Robin Hood gold card launch that we had a couple months ago I don't know if you had a chance to see that live stream, but um yeah, just like the the event where we invited a lot of customers were gold members who were really passionate about the product and kind of [01:40:00] Our ability to turn a financial product into sort of like a mainstream technology product unveil.
That was just a lot of fun to do. And You know, we have a lot of artists at Robin Hood and which is rare to say out of financial company, but the design team did a tremendous job. The sort of like machining of the card and everything and having um, having everyone sort of like contribute to this event and it was the first time we'd done anything like this.
So there was this like ceremonial almost like spiritual quality to it. I think I'll remember that for a really long time and it made me want to do it more. I think there's it's just a reminder that like, Yeah, we're a public company. We've been at this for a while, but we can keep doing new things for the first time.
And I think that's what I'm going to strive to do.
Logan: It's an interesting point where you've, uh, you've experienced the highs, uh, some lows done very well financially for investors. Personally, all that is, is it that stuff that keeps you? Motivated and going outside of the, the mission's very noble, I think at the end of the day, but there was a little, uh, not little, that was a big launch, but like, are those the, the wins that you find the most fulfilling still?
Or what's the motivation now?
Vlad: think, like, I try to find magic and enjoyment in the little things too. Yeah, and I think, like, having gone through so much volatility, I think you can't get overly excited when things are going well because and you know, because You don't want your mood to change when when that changes at the same time um, yeah, you can't get too riled up and Distraught when things are going poorly or things are [01:42:00] moving against you in some way because then that interferes with your ability to solve the problem and You You know, you don't want to be like having a panic attack or freaking out if, you know, something, something negative happens.
Um, so what I found is it's just through the highs and lows. I'd like to stay even keeled and just have a general zest and enjoyment for, for everything that I do. Uh, so I, I wouldn't say it's like the highs and the events that keep me going. Um, I, yeah, I try, I try to avoid overreacting to, to those, even though it might be tempting.
I mean, in that event, what was kind of surreal was, Looking at, uh, the stock price on Robinhood 24 hour market during the event and, you know, everyone's like, oh, did you see it, uh, it popped up and I was like, oh, let's not look at it too much. Let's just focus on shipping this great product out to customers because obviously that's, that's what's going to matter in the long run.
Logan: It's one of the interesting meta lessons for me in, in doing this and talking to different people that have been enormously successful is like, there isn't any point On the journey that necessarily leads to total fulfillment, like you're not working to some point, even when you sell the business. For example, it's always bittersweet that goes away.
Or when you go public, like there's still you still show up to work the next day and you have more stuff to do. And so that's been a it's a lesson that I think probably anyone can take away is, hey, if you don't enjoy day to day and the inputs to it. There's not some grand output that you're going to get to.
And this day is going to be so much better than make it all worth it. You have to enjoy the beauty of the process. I
Vlad: and seeing it as an educational opportunity to learn more. I mean, a lot of people that go public say, Oh, you're going to hate their earnings calls and [01:44:00] having the, um, You know, having sort of like this quarterly drumbeat where you have to show results quarterly over quarter over quarter. And, um, I kind of like the earnings calls, learn something, I get to engage with analysts like there's a, there's a fun in that too.
Logan: I've sort of found that the most quantitative, uh, founders enjoy the earnings calls elements the most because it's there's, there's all that stuff to learn. And then there's a score that gets put out there and you. Iterate on it and improve. And so I don't know to what extent your math PhD
Vlad: makes the cut. I mean, I think it's made the company better. We
Logan: In what ways?
Vlad: mean, we have to, there's sort of a pressure to, Like sync up on your progress every quarter and, you know, if you're a private company, you don't fundraise every quarter, you maybe fundraise once a year or every two years.
And I could imagine a situation where, you know, it's 2022 and, We had six billion of cash in the bank, the market turned, but if we were private, we could have probably just been like, this doesn't matter. why, why change anything? But there were a lot of changes that we made that turned us into a better company.
We're more efficient, leaner, we move much faster. We made a lot of hard decisions. And I think, um, Having to, like, communicate your progress to dispassionate outside observers that tend to be critical and pessimistic, um, yeah, it's just, it's fun. It makes, uh, it makes for a better company.
Logan: while I have you on this, and this is the last one I'll ask you, but, uh, to, to the people that say, uh, Public investors are short term oriented and it's hard to build products for the long term and the public markets. Uh, what would your [01:46:00] response? I often hear it in private companies that aren't ready to go public and it sounds like you guys have probably been able to do it.
And so what would your response be to people that sort of take that point of view? Yeah, it
Vlad: I mean, I, I haven't found that to be the case. Um, I think that credit card's a great example, right? The results of that are gonna manifest over the long run. It's a ambitious project. I mean, it's gonna take. It's going to take time for us to roll this product out to customers, scale it, make it a big business.
But we have confidence that If we put the investment in, it's going to, it's going to be a big business and it's a huge industry in the U. S., but that's not going to be a quarter over quarter results 24 hour market. I mean, that's also built up gradually over time, so it just takes time for things to build momentum, especially in our industry.
Logan: seems like it's mostly just expectation settings, be it in the public markets or private markets. Uh, it's going to be more punitive in the public markets if you miss said expectations and prices will correct quicker. But, um, it seems Amazon's been able to do a pretty good job of Building multiple products in the public market, Google has, Microsoft has, it sort of seems like a false premise of an argument to make for people that are pushing back on going public.
Vlad: I think it's also the case that you have to kind of. Earn the respect of private, of public company investors in the same way that I felt like we had to do that in the private markets as well. Um, way on the flip side of that is once you have that and you see that in companies that have been public for a long time and have had a long operating history, um, like the Amazons and NVIDIA's, um, it can be a huge differentiator to have access to the deep liquidity of the public markets.[01:48:00]
Logan: Well, on that note, thanks for doing this.
Vlad: Thank you for having me.
Logan: Thanks for Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you for joining this episode of the Logan Bartlett show with co founder and CEO of Robinhood Vlad Tenev. If you enjoyed this discussion, we really appreciate it. If you shared with anyone else that you think might find it interesting and subscribed on whatever platform you're listening on, we look forward to seeing you here next week with a new guest on the Logan Bartlett show.
Have a good weekend, everyone.