Latest / Earn Your Leisure / EYL #154 Robinhood’s CEO Vlad Tenev on GameStop Controversy, Wall Street, & Changing Finance

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EYL #154 Robinhood’s CEO Vlad Tenev on GameStop Controversy, Wall Street, & Changing Finance · Earn Your Leisure

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• 2:11
  Speaker 4: All right, guys, welcome back e y L Silicon Valley Edition,
• 2:15
  Speaker 4: Billionaire Edition the third time. Yes, yes, yes, very rare.
• 2:20
  Speaker 4: So shout out to Mark Cuban and Mike no regrets.
• 2:23
  Speaker 4: Those are the two previous billionaires that we've had on.
• 2:25
  Speaker 4: But this is a much younger situation, much younger gentlemen.
• 2:29
  Speaker 4: So and you might be familiar with his company, perhaps
• 2:33
  Speaker 4: perhaps so Vlad tenef, I say your last name correctly,
• 2:37
  Speaker 4: you did, Thank you. I get very nervous if people
• 2:41
  Speaker 4: Butcher put Butcher my name all the time, so I'm
• 2:43
  Speaker 4: very conscious about that. So thank you for having us.
• 2:48
  Speaker 4: If you guys aren't familiar, CEO of Robin Hood, Robin
• 2:52
  Speaker 4: Hood revolutionized the game when it comes to investing. Brought
• 2:57
  Speaker 4: millions of investors into the fold that previously we're not investing.
• 3:02
  Speaker 5: I think the number is like twenty twenty three million right.
• 3:05
  Speaker 8: Now new investors or total.
• 3:08
  Speaker 5: But over the pandemic, the number was like ridiculous.
• 3:13
  Speaker 4: Every day somebody comes up to me and asks me
• 3:14
  Speaker 4: to look at their portfolio, and at least eighty percent
• 3:17
  Speaker 4: of the time when they pull it up, it's Robin.
• 3:19
  Speaker 9: It's good to hear. Glad we're serving people.
• 3:23
  Speaker 4: Yes, and recently went public in July with a current
• 3:28
  Speaker 4: valuation somewhere around forty billion.
• 3:31
  Speaker 5: Dollars give or take.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 3:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah, So this is going to be an interesting conversation.
• 3:36
  Speaker 4: We're going to go a deep dive in true Eile fashion.
• 3:41
  Speaker 4: So first and foremo, thank you for having us.
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: We appreciate it, Thanks for being here.
• 3:44
  Speaker 4: Yes, yes, all right, so let's get into this. You
• 3:48
  Speaker 4: are a Bulgarian immigrant. I know both of your parents
• 3:50
  Speaker 4: worked at the World Bank. So coming to America, going
• 3:55
  Speaker 4: to Stanford University, which is, you know, one of the
• 3:59
  Speaker 4: premier universities in the wages. Yeah, especially when it comes
• 4:02
  Speaker 4: to tech, probably the number one place for people that
• 4:04
  Speaker 4: are looking at and do tech.
• 4:05
  Speaker 8: I know you had a couple of other.
• 4:06
  Speaker 4: Businesses previously, you had a bit of started in two
• 4:11
  Speaker 4: thousy ten, but then started twenty eleven. Chronoles I think
• 4:13
  Speaker 4: was the last business that you had. But what made
• 4:16
  Speaker 4: you have the idea and start Robinhood in twenty thirteen?
• 4:19
  Speaker 8: Like, where did that come from?
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah?
• 4:21
  Speaker 9: Well it it was. It was definitely a journey, so
• 4:25
  Speaker 9: I would say when I got to Stanford. Even though
• 4:28
  Speaker 9: Stanford was a university that you associate with entrepreneurship, I
• 4:34
  Speaker 9: wasn't really. I didn't come from a particularly entrepreneurial family.
• 4:39
  Speaker 9: I was interested in science and math growing up, so
• 4:43
  Speaker 9: I thought I would be a professor. So I went
• 4:45
  Speaker 9: to Stanford to study physics, and then I transitioned even
• 4:50
  Speaker 9: more kind of theoretical than physics into math, where you
• 4:54
  Speaker 9: literally have a chalkboard and a couch and that's what
• 4:58
  Speaker 9: you work with, right. I actually went to grad school
• 5:03
  Speaker 9: after graduating UCLA. I did grad school. I was in
• 5:08
  Speaker 9: a math PhD program that I ended up dropping out of.
• 5:11
  Speaker 9: But my sort of I didn't really know what I
• 5:14
  Speaker 9: was going to do with my career, but kind of
• 5:16
  Speaker 9: my default path was to be a math professor. It's
• 5:20
  Speaker 9: pretty much what you do with a math degree, because
• 5:23
  Speaker 9: I really enjoyed. What appealed to me was creating something, which,
• 5:27
  Speaker 9: in the case of being a mathematician, would be you know,
• 5:32
  Speaker 9: like a new theory or something that hopefully hundreds of
• 5:36
  Speaker 9: years from now into the future, if you're lucky, they
• 5:39
  Speaker 9: would teach to high schoolers or other students. So I
• 5:43
  Speaker 9: went there, you know, expecting to be a research mathematician.
• 5:48
  Speaker 9: I met my co founder who I started all these
• 5:51
  Speaker 9: other companies with, and he was also on the same path,
• 5:55
  Speaker 9: started physics and then transitioned to math.
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: And then.
• 6:00
  Speaker 9: Two thousand and eight when we graduated and I went
• 6:05
  Speaker 9: to grad school, and he got a job in the
• 6:07
  Speaker 9: financial industry. Kind of on a whim. The stock market crashed, right,
• 6:12
  Speaker 9: so you had Lehman Brothers going belly up, and the
• 6:16
  Speaker 9: entire uh, the entire market changed and so probably somewhat
• 6:23
  Speaker 9: foolishly if it sounds kind of silly to say it now,
• 6:28
  Speaker 9: but at the time, that seemed like the best time
• 6:31
  Speaker 9: to start a financial company, right when the financial system crashed. Yeah,
• 6:36
  Speaker 9: I mean it was in a way leveling the playing field.
• 6:39
  Speaker 9: So it was a changing of the guard, right like
• 6:42
  Speaker 9: the era of I don't know if you guys have
• 6:46
  Speaker 9: ever seen old movies of you know, traders, people trading
• 6:51
  Speaker 9: on the trading floor. Uh, you know, probably trading trading places.
• 6:56
  Speaker 9: Wall Street Trading Place is one of my favorites. That's
• 7:01
  Speaker 9: eighties from the eighties. They did do a sequel a
• 7:07
  Speaker 9: couple of years ago, but yeah, basically you see those
• 7:11
  Speaker 9: scenes of like the trading pit and the people with
• 7:14
  Speaker 9: the paper tickets flying around, and that really changed in
• 7:19
  Speaker 9: the two thousands, especially after two thousand two thousand and eight.
• 7:23
  Speaker 9: There were no more people with paper tickets, no more
• 7:27
  Speaker 9: manual trading. Everything went completely electronic, and so our previous
• 7:32
  Speaker 9: two businesses we kind of created in the wake of that.
• 7:35
  Speaker 9: So we saw an opportunity as markets were going electronic,
• 7:39
  Speaker 9: to start a software company that basically built the technology
• 7:45
  Speaker 9: and the software to support fully automated trading. And so
• 7:49
  Speaker 9: that's what Chronos was. It was basically a B to
• 7:52
  Speaker 9: B a business to business enterprise software company. We built
• 7:56
  Speaker 9: the technology and we licensed it to financial institutions who
• 8:02
  Speaker 9: couldn't really compete. You know, they were they wanted to
• 8:05
  Speaker 9: get into fully automated trading, but they were still using
• 8:07
  Speaker 9: kind of the people on the phones or the desks.
• 8:10
  Speaker 9: And so we found a little bit of a niche there.
• 8:13
  Speaker 9: And then as we were building that business and growing
• 8:16
  Speaker 9: it and scaling it, Beaiju and I both kind of
• 8:20
  Speaker 9: recognized that, you know, while we saw a path to
• 8:25
  Speaker 9: making making it a big business and growing it to
• 8:29
  Speaker 9: millions in revenue, we just weren't that passionate about about
• 8:35
  Speaker 9: the end the end result of running a big enterprise business.
• 8:39
  Speaker 9: And the way we describe it is, you know, our
• 8:42
  Speaker 9: customers were already rich. I mean, there were institutions, they
• 8:46
  Speaker 9: had money, and we were kind of helping them adapt
• 8:48
  Speaker 9: to this new environment, giving them better technology. But what
• 8:52
  Speaker 9: we really were after was building a consumer product and
• 8:56
  Speaker 9: actually improving the lives of everyday people. And you know,
• 9:00
  Speaker 9: we started thinking, like, twenty years from now, what would
• 9:05
  Speaker 9: we still want to be doing if we, you know,
• 9:07
  Speaker 9: got back from from work after a really hard day,
• 9:10
  Speaker 9: what would make us proud of what we were delivering
• 9:13
  Speaker 9: the people, and through kind of building our previous company, Kronos,
• 9:19
  Speaker 9: we realized how everything worked, how you know, a trade
• 9:23
  Speaker 9: would be processed, how it would be cleared and settled,
• 9:27
  Speaker 9: and all of like the regulatory stuff around that. And
• 9:31
  Speaker 9: then we kind of asked ourselves, well, if these institutional
• 9:35
  Speaker 9: customers that we have are doing millions of trades and
• 9:39
  Speaker 9: we have the technology to support that, what's to say
• 9:42
  Speaker 9: that regular people can't access that either? And why are
• 9:46
  Speaker 9: regular people still paying ten dollars every time they want
• 9:49
  Speaker 9: to make an investment?
• 9:50
  Speaker 5: I remember those days.
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: I always tell a story when I opened the scot
• 9:53
  Speaker 3: trade account and it was like seven dollars every trade.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm like, man, wasn't that long ago?
• 9:58
  Speaker 8: Yeah?
• 9:58
  Speaker 5: Yeah? So the first come was Scelaris. Is that am
• 10:01
  Speaker 5: I saying that? Right?
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah?
• 10:02
  Speaker 3: So when I was doing a researcher and it feels
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: like we took the trading part of Selaris, we had
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: the institutional side, and we said, okay, I said, well,
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: because I'm like wearing this together, right, Yeah, but you
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: guys saw what you could make. You were inside of
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: the institutional side saying like we've read these people already rich,
• 10:22
  Speaker 3: and you birthed what you what you're known for now
• 10:25
  Speaker 3: is that is that kind of how it worked?
• 10:27
  Speaker 9: Well, we we had we saw what our customers were
• 10:29
  Speaker 9: able to do, what a trade looked like for an institution,
• 10:33
  Speaker 9: the cost structure behind it, which was essentially zero. You know,
• 10:36
  Speaker 9: they were placing some of these some of these customers
• 10:39
  Speaker 9: are placing you know, billions of dollars in dollar value
• 10:43
  Speaker 9: of trades per day, you know, millions of trades per day.
• 10:47
  Speaker 9: And they couldn't do that at if it was seven
• 10:50
  Speaker 9: dollars a trade, right, So the cost structure was fundamentally different.
• 10:54
  Speaker 9: So yeah, then then it's natural. And you know, I
• 10:59
  Speaker 9: remember at the time also watching watching all of Steve
• 11:05
  Speaker 9: Jobs's keynotes for the Apple events, and he had he
• 11:10
  Speaker 9: had rolled out the iPad, the first iPad at around
• 11:14
  Speaker 9: that time, and this was like while we were in
• 11:16
  Speaker 9: the thick of like building out our enterprise product, we
• 11:21
  Speaker 9: sort of saw I still remember watching that keynote and
• 11:26
  Speaker 9: just thinking like how awesome it is to roll out
• 11:30
  Speaker 9: a consumer product and to actually have you know, everyday
• 11:33
  Speaker 9: people wanting what you're building and to just just serve
• 11:38
  Speaker 9: them rather than serving businesses and having to do enterprise sales.
• 11:43
  Speaker 9: It's just fundamentally different. So we wanted to do that,
• 11:47
  Speaker 9: and then we saw an opportunity and when we got
• 11:50
  Speaker 9: the idea for just the simple value proposition, right paying
• 11:56
  Speaker 9: zero dollars per transaction instead of paying seven dollars and
• 12:01
  Speaker 9: kind of making it mobile, because nobody had done that
• 12:05
  Speaker 9: really in the past. All the other brokerages that allowed
• 12:07
  Speaker 9: you to invest on mobile, they basically took their web
• 12:12
  Speaker 9: pages and kind of shrunk them down. They were still complicated,
• 12:15
  Speaker 9: they weren't really built for mobile. You couldn't sign up
• 12:18
  Speaker 9: on mobile. You still needed your computer. So we saw
• 12:23
  Speaker 9: when we got that idea, we knew it was a
• 12:26
  Speaker 9: big idea, and we knew that, you know, if we
• 12:29
  Speaker 9: just brought it to market that.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: It had to work. I mean, we executed well.
• 12:34
  Speaker 4: It bring an idea and it is something that I'm
• 12:36
  Speaker 4: surprised nobody thought about because it's like that's when I
• 12:40
  Speaker 4: think of Robinhood, I think of two things. Use it interface.
• 12:43
  Speaker 4: It's extremely use it friendly, even on the optional side,
• 12:46
  Speaker 4: which can be complicated. Yeah, it's made it extremely user
• 12:49
  Speaker 4: friendly and it doesn't cost anything, which now everybody kind
• 12:54
  Speaker 4: of has adopted that model. But if you're not familiar
• 12:57
  Speaker 4: with it. It wasn't always the case, like that wasn't always
• 12:59
  Speaker 4: the standard, like you said, it used to be like
• 13:00
  Speaker 4: seven dollars per trade or five dollars per tray or
• 13:03
  Speaker 4: something like that. That adds up over the course of time.
• 13:06
  Speaker 4: So those two key elements were like the foundation to
• 13:09
  Speaker 4: use an interface and having it free.
• 13:11
  Speaker 9: Yeah, well, I think there were a couple of other
• 13:13
  Speaker 9: things there. I think the user interface and being mobile
• 13:16
  Speaker 9: first were important. I think the cost structure is fundamentally important.
• 13:20
  Speaker 9: And if you think about it, if you are someone
• 13:23
  Speaker 9: that's just getting started, hasn't invested before, and you have
• 13:28
  Speaker 9: one hundred dollars, you know, it's kind of a it's
• 13:31
  Speaker 9: a big step to say I'll put one thousand dollars
• 13:35
  Speaker 9: towards something. If you're just getting started, that's kind of
• 13:37
  Speaker 9: a big commitment. But ten dollars one hundred dollars you
• 13:40
  Speaker 9: could theoretically start with that. But if you're paying seven
• 13:44
  Speaker 9: dollars per transaction, that was just not possible, like it
• 13:48
  Speaker 9: would the fees would eat into every trade, and it
• 13:51
  Speaker 9: would be impossible to diversify as well. So if you
• 13:54
  Speaker 9: want a portfolio with seven different stocks, you know, that's
• 13:57
  Speaker 9: seventy dollars or fifty dollars if you wanted to make
• 14:01
  Speaker 9: those seven transactions. So it was actually impossible or very
• 14:05
  Speaker 9: very difficult to get started with.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: Small a bounts of money.
• 14:10
  Speaker 9: But I think the other thing also was you look
• 14:14
  Speaker 9: more broadly, and now people talk about fintech as kind
• 14:18
  Speaker 9: of a space, as a big industry. You know, lots
• 14:22
  Speaker 9: of fintech companies, cryptos now becoming a bigger and bigger thing.
• 14:26
  Speaker 9: But when we got started, people weren't really starting financial
• 14:31
  Speaker 9: companies very much. I mean, you look at Google trends
• 14:36
  Speaker 9: sometimes I do this. If you look at fintech, there
• 14:39
  Speaker 9: was like nothing up until twenty fifteen, right, and then
• 14:42
  Speaker 9: you've seen a steady increase and now you know tons
• 14:47
  Speaker 9: of fintech companies across insurance, across spending saving you know people,
• 14:51
  Speaker 9: there's a lot of a lot of innovation, and investors
• 14:55
  Speaker 9: didn't used to invest in it. I mean, when we
• 14:59
  Speaker 9: were first getting started and we tell people we wanted
• 15:02
  Speaker 9: to create a regulated brokerage, that would scare a lot
• 15:05
  Speaker 9: of people off. It'd be like, we haven't seen that before.
• 15:08
  Speaker 9: You know, we're funding consumer apps and you know you
• 15:11
  Speaker 9: don't want it. You don't want to be regulated, That's
• 15:13
  Speaker 9: what they tell us. You definitely don't want to be
• 15:15
  Speaker 9: regulated because that's just going to be really hard. You're
• 15:18
  Speaker 9: not going to be able to innovate. And you know,
• 15:20
  Speaker 9: the only regulated companies are these companies that are forty
• 15:23
  Speaker 9: years old and have you know, billion dollar marketing budgets.
• 15:27
  Speaker 9: So I think just the the decision to build a
• 15:31
  Speaker 9: regulated brokerage at the time was a it was kind
• 15:35
  Speaker 9: of contrarian, right. We were like, we're not going to
• 15:38
  Speaker 9: stay away from this. We know that, you know, to
• 15:41
  Speaker 9: do that is going to be hard, and because it's hard,
• 15:45
  Speaker 9: not that many people have done it recently, and you know,
• 15:49
  Speaker 9: we think we think there's something there. And we kind
• 15:51
  Speaker 9: of understood that process too, of what it meant to
• 15:54
  Speaker 9: be regulated and operating in a regulated industry from our
• 15:57
  Speaker 9: previous experience, and we knew that it wasn't as scary
• 16:01
  Speaker 9: as you know, people people initially thought. You just kind
• 16:05
  Speaker 9: of had to figure it out and work through it
• 16:07
  Speaker 9: like any other any other problem or constraint.
• 16:10
  Speaker 4: Me let me ask you this, as far as a
• 16:11
  Speaker 4: lot of people that listen to our platform are aspiring
• 16:15
  Speaker 4: entrepreneurs or young just getting started, so the number one
• 16:18
  Speaker 4: heard was always funding. So you know, we see where
• 16:21
  Speaker 4: Robinhood is now obviously, you know, like I said, forty
• 16:24
  Speaker 4: billion dollar valuation, but it didn't away start like that.
• 16:26
  Speaker 4: So can you walk us through the process of funding?
• 16:29
  Speaker 4: Did you sell fund did you get money from family?
• 16:32
  Speaker 4: I'm assuming angel investors came in at some point, but
• 16:35
  Speaker 4: can you kind of just walk up through that.
• 16:37
  Speaker 9: Yeah, So there were a couple of different We we
• 16:40
  Speaker 9: had a long period where we had just raised some
• 16:42
  Speaker 9: seed money. So that started in like twenty twelve, twenty thirteen,
• 16:48
  Speaker 9: and we probably raised in aggregate about three million dollars
• 16:52
  Speaker 9: in seed capital, and that was probably the hardest outside investors.
• 16:58
  Speaker 9: Outside investors, lots of them, lots of small investors. We
• 17:03
  Speaker 9: were actually you could find robin Hood an angel list
• 17:07
  Speaker 9: in twenty twelve or twenty thirteen on the wrong sites,
• 17:12
  Speaker 9: So you know, talk to a lot of people. A
• 17:14
  Speaker 9: lot of people were skeptical, but there were some people
• 17:17
  Speaker 9: that made early bets into the business and kind of
• 17:22
  Speaker 9: kind of took that bet. So Index Ventures invested in
• 17:26
  Speaker 9: our seed round and then a bunch of subsequent rounds too.
• 17:30
  Speaker 9: So that was Jan Hammer who led the seed round,
• 17:35
  Speaker 9: led the a round as well, and is still on
• 17:38
  Speaker 9: our board through IPO. We had Google Ventures. We had
• 17:43
  Speaker 9: Tim Draper from Draper Fisher Jervis. Yeah, lots of lots
• 17:49
  Speaker 9: of angel investors.
• 17:51
  Speaker 8: Got big names out the gate. Well that's a big name.
• 17:56
  Speaker 9: Yeah, so he came towards the end of our seed round,
• 17:59
  Speaker 9: but yeah, it was very early.
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: So what was that process like, Because I'm thinking generationally
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: at the time, you're in your twenties. Yeah, tell them
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: about a product that's revolutionary to our generation. For sure,
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: it's simplistic in its design. But these guys are traditionalists.
• 18:14
  Speaker 5: So what was that like?
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: In a sense traditionalist because they've been in the financial
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: industry for years, never seen anything like this. I feel
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: like when we talk about technology and anything that's new,
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: people are rigid, and yeah, they hesitant toward it. So
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: what was that like even explaining it to get the
• 18:28
  Speaker 3: seed funded.
• 18:29
  Speaker 9: I mean, I think that the people that got it,
• 18:33
  Speaker 9: there were some people that got very excited about it,
• 18:36
  Speaker 9: and you know, I think they looked at the quality
• 18:39
  Speaker 9: of the team and that we were really passionate and
• 18:44
  Speaker 9: and basically you know, wanted to give it a shot
• 18:48
  Speaker 9: right away. Then there's people that needed a little bit
• 18:50
  Speaker 9: of convincing, and you know, they talked through the business
• 18:54
  Speaker 9: model and they really had to understand it. And then
• 18:56
  Speaker 9: there's people, the majority of people that just sort of
• 19:00
  Speaker 9: like wrote it off for one reason or another. Either
• 19:04
  Speaker 9: they looked at the competitors and said, there hasn't been
• 19:06
  Speaker 9: a new brokerage in a long time, you'll never make money,
• 19:09
  Speaker 9: you'll never get customers, YouTube mathematicians. We don't believe you
• 19:14
  Speaker 9: can build a consumer product that's good. So there's a
• 19:17
  Speaker 9: lot of reasons why I think a rational person would
• 19:20
  Speaker 9: say no. I mean, fintech as a category didn't really
• 19:23
  Speaker 9: exist back then either. But yeah, there were people that
• 19:28
  Speaker 9: got excited and really passionate angel investors that supported us
• 19:33
  Speaker 9: and gave us the funding. And I think another thing
• 19:35
  Speaker 9: that made it hard is because it's so regulated. The
• 19:39
  Speaker 9: traditional lean startup methodology where you kind of like test
• 19:45
  Speaker 9: out the messaging and test out whether the value prop
• 19:48
  Speaker 9: of the product resonates with customers, that didn't really work.
• 19:53
  Speaker 9: So we had to actually get all the regulatory approvals
• 19:56
  Speaker 9: and the license before we could start marketing a brokerage
• 19:59
  Speaker 9: produc because it was so regulated. So it's a little
• 20:02
  Speaker 9: bit of a of a chicken and egg problem because
• 20:04
  Speaker 9: we needed the funding to get the license. But you know,
• 20:09
  Speaker 9: people would be hesitant to give you funding if they
• 20:14
  Speaker 9: thought that there was a risk that you wouldn't get
• 20:16
  Speaker 9: the license to be a broker. So at the end
• 20:20
  Speaker 9: of the day, you know, we had to talk to
• 20:22
  Speaker 9: a lot of people. I think I said on a podcast,
• 20:25
  Speaker 9: I mean this was obviously an order of magnitude rough approximation,
• 20:30
  Speaker 9: but we probably talked to seventy five investors or more
• 20:33
  Speaker 9: to raise the three million dollars.
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like Ryan said, Wilsten ninety nine know this
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: before we got out, Yes.
• 20:39
  Speaker 4: Yeah, well how important was the network? Obviously going to
• 20:42
  Speaker 4: Stanford there's no other better place to go, So where
• 20:45
  Speaker 4: a lot of those relationships built from Stanford? Or I
• 20:48
  Speaker 4: mean your parents would work for the World Bang too,
• 20:50
  Speaker 4: So did you have where did you get those relationships?
• 20:54
  Speaker 8: To even approach angel investors?
• 20:56
  Speaker 9: We had to build them from scratch because even though
• 20:59
  Speaker 9: we had gone to Standford, we were kind of we
• 21:02
  Speaker 9: were like in the math department, and people don't start
• 21:04
  Speaker 9: companies out of the math department.
• 21:06
  Speaker 5: It comes a math team.
• 21:07
  Speaker 9: Again, So neither Baiju or I spent a lot of
• 21:11
  Speaker 9: time you know, we never did internships at Google or Facebook.
• 21:15
  Speaker 9: We didn't you know, go to the CS department. We
• 21:17
  Speaker 9: took some CS classes, but it wasn't like you know nowadays,
• 21:22
  Speaker 9: I think there's like a machine at Stanford where you know,
• 21:26
  Speaker 9: if you're in the CS department, which right now is
• 21:28
  Speaker 9: the most most popular one. But back when, back when
• 21:32
  Speaker 9: I was there, it was before the current kind of
• 21:35
  Speaker 9: like startup friends computer science. Computer science. Yeah, so people
• 21:38
  Speaker 9: were majoring. When I was at Stanford, the number one
• 21:41
  Speaker 9: major was human biology, which is basically pre med and
• 21:44
  Speaker 9: then there were a lot of people that were interested
• 21:46
  Speaker 9: in like investment banking, and they would go into finance,
• 21:49
  Speaker 9: and I think computer science was probably third or fourth.
• 21:52
  Speaker 9: So it was growing. But you know, nowadays, Stanford I
• 21:56
  Speaker 9: think is very integrated with like venture capital, and they've
• 22:00
  Speaker 9: and have like startup accelerators where you could apply and
• 22:05
  Speaker 9: and they can help you out. But you know, when
• 22:07
  Speaker 9: you're a mathematician, you're not you're not really you're not
• 22:10
  Speaker 9: really spending time doing any of that. So we had
• 22:13
  Speaker 9: to build the networks from scratch. And you know, we
• 22:17
  Speaker 9: were in New York actually for our first two companies,
• 22:20
  Speaker 9: and at that time there was No, there was not
• 22:23
  Speaker 9: a lot of venture capital in New York. I mean,
• 22:26
  Speaker 9: now it's probably a little bit better, but in the
• 22:29
  Speaker 9: early twenty tens, late two thousands, there were maybe like
• 22:32
  Speaker 9: a handful of investors in New York. So we moved
• 22:37
  Speaker 9: back to California to start this business, and so we
• 22:41
  Speaker 9: were really starting from scratch. You know, We're coming to
• 22:43
  Speaker 9: a new place and didn't really have the luxury of
• 22:47
  Speaker 9: the Stanford network. And that's why, you know, we hustled.
• 22:51
  Speaker 9: We met investors. We tried to like go two degrees
• 22:54
  Speaker 9: of separation, so we would ask friends if they had
• 22:58
  Speaker 9: any friends that were that were investors.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: We went on angel list, where.
• 23:02
  Speaker 8: Angel list is a website with that list all angel investors.
• 23:06
  Speaker 9: Yeah, it's a platform. It's a platform and you can
• 23:08
  Speaker 9: create for earlier stage companies. Generally you can create a
• 23:13
  Speaker 9: profile as a startup and then they help you connect
• 23:17
  Speaker 9: with angel investors. And I think there's also recruiting, so
• 23:23
  Speaker 9: some people look for look for jobs and you can
• 23:26
  Speaker 9: you can hire a little bit out of angel list
• 23:28
  Speaker 9: as well.
• 23:28
  Speaker 5: And you said something about having the team.
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: A strong team is a team the network that you
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: found at Stanford or these are people that we just
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: kind of along the journey said you know what you're
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: great at that, we'll find you here.
• 23:38
  Speaker 5: How did you build the team?
• 23:40
  Speaker 9: Yeah, that's actually very unconventional. So because we didn't have
• 23:44
  Speaker 9: because we weren't really in computer science, I couldn't call
• 23:49
  Speaker 9: up my friends that were that were computer science majors
• 23:52
  Speaker 9: and get them to join, right, So we did it
• 23:55
  Speaker 9: in a sense very traditionally. We would get a booth
• 23:58
  Speaker 9: at the Career Fair. So it was actually, you know,
• 24:02
  Speaker 9: a bunch of the big companies, but you could you
• 24:04
  Speaker 9: could get a booth if you're an alumni and you're incorporated.
• 24:06
  Speaker 9: I think it was like seven hundred dollars, and we
• 24:08
  Speaker 9: would collect resumes and actually, you know, Beaiju and I
• 24:12
  Speaker 9: would would man the booths ourselves with our T shirts
• 24:15
  Speaker 9: and hand out swag, and a lot of our really
• 24:18
  Speaker 9: really great initial employees were just from the Stanford Career Fair.
• 24:22
  Speaker 5: And people's escaped career Day all the time.
• 24:25
  Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, Bible, you never know.
• 24:29
  Speaker 9: There's always a way to I think if you if
• 24:32
  Speaker 9: you're scrappy enough, there's a way to to make it happen.
• 24:35
  Speaker 9: I think not a lot of people would think about
• 24:36
  Speaker 9: going straight to the career fair. But for us, because
• 24:39
  Speaker 9: we never had internships at these companies, our only experience
• 24:43
  Speaker 9: to like getting a job was the career fair. So
• 24:46
  Speaker 9: it was sort of like the first thing that came
• 24:48
  Speaker 9: to mind. Oh, of course, that's how we want to
• 24:49
  Speaker 9: hire people. Let's just figure out how to how to
• 24:52
  Speaker 9: get one of those booths.
• 24:54
  Speaker 5: I got my first job at a career fair.
• 24:55
  Speaker 8: Did you?
• 24:56
  Speaker 5: Yeah?
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: I was how to tell it was like interviewing you
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: in the booth that was like education expo, and I
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: was sitting there. You get an interview and they'll tell
• 25:04
  Speaker 3: you to come back to the school. I bombed the
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: first one and I was sitting waiting for my friend
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: to do the next one. And I was like, I
• 25:10
  Speaker 3: need a job, and the guy was like, you need
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: a job? I told to me, And that's how I
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: got my job.
• 25:14
  Speaker 4: That's how people are getting hired as teachers these days.
• 25:18
  Speaker 4: Be very I was fifteen years ago. You're listening in
• 25:21
  Speaker 4: New York City, Chao children, you should be very disturbed
• 25:24
  Speaker 4: if they go to public school. So let me ask
• 25:27
  Speaker 4: you this. It seems like this has happened very quickly.
• 25:29
  Speaker 4: So at what point do you get the app up
• 25:32
  Speaker 4: and running and actually have a product that people are
• 25:35
  Speaker 4: actually downloading and starting to use.
• 25:37
  Speaker 9: Yeah, good question. It does seem the way when I
• 25:40
  Speaker 9: talk about it here, it seems like it happens very quickly,
• 25:43
  Speaker 9: but it it took years, right like we first got
• 25:46
  Speaker 9: the idea. So we moved back to California from New
• 25:49
  Speaker 9: York during the Kronos stays in twenty eleven, end of
• 25:54
  Speaker 9: twenty eleven, and we get the idea for robin Hood
• 25:57
  Speaker 9: February twenty twelve.
• 25:59
  Speaker 5: Who comes up with the name?
• 26:01
  Speaker 9: Actually, my wife came up with the name. My girlfriend
• 26:05
  Speaker 9: at the time now wife, and she was trying to
• 26:08
  Speaker 9: explain to her friends what I what I was doing,
• 26:11
  Speaker 9: and she'd be like, oh, well, you know my boyfriend Vlad,
• 26:15
  Speaker 9: he's in finance, and then they'd kind of grow and
• 26:18
  Speaker 9: they'd be like, yeah, I think of some kind of
• 26:20
  Speaker 9: investment banker or something, and then she'd say, no, no, no,
• 26:24
  Speaker 9: you know, they're kind of the Robinhood of finance. They're
• 26:26
  Speaker 9: trying to build something new for the little guy.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: And so then Beiju and I.
• 26:33
  Speaker 9: Had a couple of ideas for the name, and we
• 26:35
  Speaker 9: asked some of our employees, but both of us just
• 26:39
  Speaker 9: kind of liked Robinhood. We thought that it stood for something,
• 26:43
  Speaker 9: you know, something very powerful, a powerful idea, And you know,
• 26:48
  Speaker 9: I think Jeff Bezos says that the name is probably
• 26:53
  Speaker 9: like three percent of it, but sometimes that three percent
• 26:55
  Speaker 9: is the difference between doing very well and not so
• 27:00
  Speaker 9: pretty happy with with how it ended up. And I
• 27:04
  Speaker 9: do think that, you know, we're trying very very hard
• 27:07
  Speaker 9: to stay true to your missions. Dame stands for yeah, yes, okay.
• 27:13
  Speaker 4: So what what year does Robinhood actually get up and
• 27:16
  Speaker 4: run out to the public.
• 27:18
  Speaker 9: Yes, we get the idea twenty twelve, We spend a
• 27:21
  Speaker 9: lot of time getting the licenses, We launch a wait
• 27:24
  Speaker 9: list December of twenty thirteen, and then the app hits
• 27:28
  Speaker 9: the app Store in beta December of twenty fourteen, so
• 27:31
  Speaker 9: about a year after the waitlist and maybe a year
• 27:37
  Speaker 9: and a half two years after we get the idea
• 27:39
  Speaker 9: two and a half years actually, and then public launch
• 27:42
  Speaker 9: March of twenty fifteen.
• 27:44
  Speaker 4: So at what point do you guys start to market
• 27:49
  Speaker 4: Because it feels like I never I didn't really remember
• 27:52
  Speaker 4: seeing like Robinhood commercials. It's just one of these things
• 27:55
  Speaker 4: that everybody just had Robinhood overnight. So like, what was
• 27:58
  Speaker 4: the marketing plan for to just become as popular as
• 28:01
  Speaker 4: it become.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: Well, so.
• 28:05
  Speaker 9: It's largely been word of mouth from the very beginning.
• 28:10
  Speaker 9: And in December of twenty thirteen, what we launched was
• 28:13
  Speaker 9: a weight list, So basically, you could sign up for
• 28:17
  Speaker 9: the weight list, we would let you know when we
• 28:20
  Speaker 9: could onboard you, when we could onboard you onto the product,
• 28:23
  Speaker 9: and the weight list kind of gives you early access
• 28:28
  Speaker 9: to the product. So the weightlist itself, I think you
• 28:32
  Speaker 9: could think of as marketing, although the idea was we
• 28:36
  Speaker 9: wanted to kind of create a slow and steady way
• 28:40
  Speaker 9: to onboard people in the order that they were most
• 28:42
  Speaker 9: passionate about the product, So get the people that are
• 28:45
  Speaker 9: most excited to try it access first, and that way
• 28:49
  Speaker 9: we could get high quality feedback. And yes, of course
• 28:55
  Speaker 9: we did just like interviews, so CNBC pretty early on Bloomberg,
• 29:01
  Speaker 9: those kinds of places wanted to interview us because it
• 29:04
  Speaker 9: was it was a simple to understand idea right commission
• 29:08
  Speaker 9: free trading. People kind of knew that trades cost seven dollars,
• 29:11
  Speaker 9: so how are these how are these uh these people
• 29:14
  Speaker 9: doing it for free? And uh, you know, we were
• 29:18
  Speaker 9: able to get close to a million people on the
• 29:21
  Speaker 9: wait list in a year, which was a lot of
• 29:24
  Speaker 9: pre launch I mean for a financial product, probably among
• 29:28
  Speaker 9: the biggest pre launch weight lists in history at the time.
• 29:34
  Speaker 4: And then once it comes out, it's just wow, wildfire
• 29:37
  Speaker 4: just started spreading like wildfire.
• 29:38
  Speaker 9: Yes, we knew when the weight list was was live
• 29:41
  Speaker 9: that people were interested in it, so we kind of
• 29:44
  Speaker 9: had our We kind of had the wind at our
• 29:47
  Speaker 9: back since the the waitlist launch and then uh when
• 29:51
  Speaker 9: it when it went live, I mean it was it
• 29:55
  Speaker 9: was pretty consistent. I mean, we grew pretty consistently people
• 30:00
  Speaker 9: people were interested in the idea, and then that's when
• 30:03
  Speaker 9: kind of the iteration engine started, so we would I
• 30:07
  Speaker 9: think one of the one of the interesting things you
• 30:09
  Speaker 9: learn is that in a consumer product, you get a
• 30:12
  Speaker 9: lot of customer feedback, and so you listen to the feedback,
• 30:15
  Speaker 9: and we really built a process from the very beginning
• 30:19
  Speaker 9: of you know, going to people's houses in some cases,
• 30:23
  Speaker 9: watching them use the product, having them come to our office,
• 30:26
  Speaker 9: seeing you know, what they were struggling with, what their
• 30:28
  Speaker 9: pain points were, and then and then kind of reasoning
• 30:33
  Speaker 9: from first principles to figure out how to solve them.
• 30:36
  Speaker 9: So a bunch of our early products, like Robinhood instant
• 30:39
  Speaker 9: Robinhood Gold. They solved customer pain points and we would
• 30:43
  Speaker 9: see as soon as we rolled them out that you know,
• 30:46
  Speaker 9: we'd grow a little bit faster, the business would improve.
• 30:50
  Speaker 9: And then you know that really built the product development
• 30:53
  Speaker 9: process that we have today.
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: When so when you built the app and you had
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: the design team where you very super intentional about saying,
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: I want to make this appealing to a younger audience
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: because if you look at your demographics now, right eighteen
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: to forty is that's the sweet spot for robber Hood users.
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: So what you're thinking, all right, we're gonna get We're
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: gonna start younger with a younger audience. Here's how we'll
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: do with this interface. It's user friendly, it'll be appealing
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: to a young audience. Is that was at the initial
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: thought when building interface.
• 31:23
  Speaker 9: I think the initial thought was that we would target
• 31:26
  Speaker 9: a younger customer. And it wasn't It wasn't necessarily because
• 31:33
  Speaker 9: you know, we didn't want to target target people that
• 31:37
  Speaker 9: you know, were more experienced or older. It's just that
• 31:40
  Speaker 9: as we thought about it, we thought that there were
• 31:43
  Speaker 9: people that were underserved, and it was people with less
• 31:46
  Speaker 9: money and people that you know didn't already have a
• 31:50
  Speaker 9: brokerage account and also juxtaposed that with like people who
• 31:55
  Speaker 9: are mobile savvy, and you know, they were mobile savvy
• 32:01
  Speaker 9: and were likely to be early adopters of new financial products.
• 32:06
  Speaker 9: So you're kind of like zero into two younger demographic
• 32:10
  Speaker 9: in any case, And not to mention we were building
• 32:14
  Speaker 9: We were building it ourselves, right, and we were in
• 32:16
  Speaker 9: our twenties at the time, so we wanted to build
• 32:19
  Speaker 9: something that we could use and could appeal to us
• 32:23
  Speaker 9: and also could appeal to, you know, to a broader demographic.
• 32:28
  Speaker 4: So let me ask you this because there's always hiccups
• 32:31
  Speaker 4: and there's always problems, but I think it's important that
• 32:33
  Speaker 4: people actually know the truth. So obviously everybody heard about
• 32:37
  Speaker 4: the game Stop situation, yeah, and you spoke about that,
• 32:41
  Speaker 4: but our audience might not have been on those platforms.
• 32:44
  Speaker 8: That you've actually articulated what happened.
• 32:46
  Speaker 4: So can you explain, because we actually got caught not
• 32:48
  Speaker 4: with Robinhood another brokerage we won't we won't name, but
• 32:52
  Speaker 4: we got we got caught with that where we put
• 32:54
  Speaker 4: a put on Game Stop, oh yeah, and the put
• 32:58
  Speaker 4: one crazy and one we were up upwards of Fiery
• 33:05
  Speaker 4: and tried to sell it and we couldn't sell it,
• 33:09
  Speaker 4: and then we ended up losing money on a long
• 33:11
  Speaker 4: story short, So I sympathized with people that couldn't sell
• 33:13
  Speaker 4: their game stops positions because it just so happens that
• 33:15
  Speaker 4: we were one of those people.
• 33:17
  Speaker 8: Like I said, it wasn't Robinhood, it was another. It
• 33:18
  Speaker 8: was another that's good to hear.
• 33:20
  Speaker 4: So a lot of people that you know, just got
• 33:23
  Speaker 4: into investing, they would they wasn't sure exactly what happened.
• 33:26
  Speaker 4: Can you just kind of explain what happened when you
• 33:28
  Speaker 4: had the halt trading? I believe right you halted selling
• 33:32
  Speaker 4: and buying a robbin of GameStop for a day or two.
• 33:36
  Speaker 9: Just the Yeah, we had to halt opening positions. So
• 33:42
  Speaker 9: it was it was any any position that sort of
• 33:47
  Speaker 9: increased risk. So for example, since we don't allow shorting,
• 33:52
  Speaker 9: it was you couldn't buy the Meme stocks, because you know,
• 33:57
  Speaker 9: if we had allowed shorting, it would be you couldn't
• 33:59
  Speaker 9: open short position as well. But that's why it was
• 34:03
  Speaker 9: the buy side. And then in options, since you guys
• 34:06
  Speaker 9: mentioned that opening up options contracts, whether they be on
• 34:11
  Speaker 9: the long side or the short side, was not allowed either.
• 34:16
  Speaker 9: But you could always throughout the process, you could always
• 34:20
  Speaker 9: close out your existing positions, so we didn't. We didn't
• 34:25
  Speaker 9: disallow you know, selling a stock if you had it,
• 34:27
  Speaker 9: or selling a put or a call, or closing out.
• 34:31
  Speaker 9: You couldn't open new positions for the time period that
• 34:34
  Speaker 9: we restricted the trading. And you know, really what it
• 34:38
  Speaker 9: was was I call it five sigma event, So I
• 34:43
  Speaker 9: think one in three point five million. I mean, we'd
• 34:46
  Speaker 9: never seen anything like that before, which was basically you
• 34:53
  Speaker 9: combine social media and the financial markets.
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: The idea of.
• 35:00
  Speaker 9: You know, people getting together and banding together all to
• 35:04
  Speaker 9: buy a handful of stocks, you know, game Stop, AMC
• 35:09
  Speaker 9: and a few others, and yeah, these people essentially made
• 35:15
  Speaker 9: the purchasing of the stocks go viral on social media,
• 35:19
  Speaker 9: and so it went viral and social media, but then
• 35:21
  Speaker 9: sort of spilled over into the financial markets because people
• 35:25
  Speaker 9: would download broker j apps. You know, Robinhood went to
• 35:30
  Speaker 9: number one on the App store during that time period overall,
• 35:33
  Speaker 9: which is very rare for a financial product.
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: Because number fifteen right now in finance, I.
• 35:38
  Speaker 9: Think, yeah, yeah, this was number one overall, ahead of
• 35:41
  Speaker 9: like TikTok and Snapchat, Instagram, And I think the market's
• 35:46
  Speaker 9: just what ended up happening. Was the markets weren't built
• 35:49
  Speaker 9: for that.
• 35:49
  Speaker 8: Too much stress being put on the market.
• 35:51
  Speaker 9: Yeah, so the collateral requirements, that deposit requirements went up,
• 35:56
  Speaker 9: and a lot of this is covered. I had to
• 35:58
  Speaker 9: give a testimony to the House Financial Services.
• 36:02
  Speaker 5: Yeah, it was a little short.
• 36:03
  Speaker 9: Then it was a little bit I had to clean
• 36:05
  Speaker 9: it up, but I've let it grow out since then. Yeah,
• 36:10
  Speaker 9: I got a lot of a lot of criticism from
• 36:14
  Speaker 9: a haircut.
• 36:15
  Speaker 4: So you you yes, I don't know who Lord Valiant
• 36:19
  Speaker 4: look that up, Prince Valiant or something. So in front
• 36:22
  Speaker 4: of college you said it wasn't really you had enough
• 36:25
  Speaker 4: for capital, but it was it was not enough liquidity
• 36:28
  Speaker 4: for the immediate collateral.
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: Well, it was.
• 36:31
  Speaker 9: It was basically, you know, the the requirements were growing exponentially.
• 36:38
  Speaker 9: So certainly we had enough to meet our capital call
• 36:41
  Speaker 9: that Thursday, and we met our deposit requirements. But if
• 36:46
  Speaker 9: you're number one on the app store, it's it's sort of, uh,
• 36:50
  Speaker 9: how far could it continue? Yeah, so you know, Robinhood
• 36:54
  Speaker 9: Securities are clearing firm. A lot of other brokers ended
• 36:58
  Speaker 9: up with the same issue.
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: M hmm.
• 37:00
  Speaker 9: A bunch of other brokers essentially had to had to
• 37:03
  Speaker 9: come up with the same thing, but since we were
• 37:08
  Speaker 9: since we were vertically integrated and we had our own
• 37:11
  Speaker 9: clearing firm, it was all inside Robinhood. So Robinhood Security
• 37:16
  Speaker 9: has had to make the decision to pco the stocks
• 37:19
  Speaker 9: and the options for all these things, and then we
• 37:22
  Speaker 9: went out and raised billions of dollars to try to
• 37:25
  Speaker 9: unrestrict them.
• 37:25
  Speaker 4: I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you about that. But before
• 37:27
  Speaker 4: I ask you about this, I still this is clear.
• 37:29
  Speaker 4: I haven't I used to be a financial advisor, and
• 37:31
  Speaker 4: I haven't heard this term in a long time.
• 37:33
  Speaker 8: But when I was reading.
• 37:33
  Speaker 4: It the T plus two timeline, Yeah, and you were
• 37:37
  Speaker 4: saying that that's problematic. Well, hey, can you explain what
• 37:41
  Speaker 4: that is for people?
• 37:42
  Speaker 8: And why?
• 37:42
  Speaker 4: Why is that something that needs to be changed? You
• 37:44
  Speaker 4: said that that's to be something that should be done
• 37:46
  Speaker 4: immediately and.
• 37:46
  Speaker 9: Not yeah, two days. So yeah, this is a very
• 37:51
  Speaker 9: sort of arcade thing. But I'll try to I'll try
• 37:57
  Speaker 9: to explain it in as easy terms as possible. So, uh, yeah,
• 38:03
  Speaker 9: imagine Robinhood is like a ice cream store, right, instead
• 38:08
  Speaker 9: of selling stocks, we sell people ice cream. And you
• 38:12
  Speaker 9: know you're a customer, you want your ice cream you
• 38:14
  Speaker 9: go to Robinhood, and the current financial market situation would
• 38:20
  Speaker 9: be basically as if we take your money, we put
• 38:27
  Speaker 9: it in a safe for two days, then we give
• 38:31
  Speaker 9: you the ice cream.
• 38:33
  Speaker 8: Uh.
• 38:33
  Speaker 9: But then we take we take our corporate money, right,
• 38:39
  Speaker 9: our corporate cash, and you know, give it to our suppliers.
• 38:43
  Speaker 9: So you know, you'd think we just take your cash,
• 38:46
  Speaker 9: give you your ice cream, and it's very simple like that,
• 38:49
  Speaker 9: but we actually have to lock up the customer cash, uh,
• 38:53
  Speaker 9: just in case something happens with the bank transaction like
• 38:57
  Speaker 9: it's it's reversed to control for you know, what's called
• 39:00
  Speaker 9: the liquidity risk and the market risk. And then we
• 39:04
  Speaker 9: have to use our corporate cash to fund the purchases.
• 39:07
  Speaker 9: And you know, the corporate cash is finite. So people
• 39:13
  Speaker 9: ask a lot of times, why can't you know, I
• 39:15
  Speaker 9: have my thousand dollars, Why can't I just use my
• 39:19
  Speaker 9: thousand dollars to.
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: Buy the stock.
• 39:21
  Speaker 9: Well, for the way that the settlement system works, we
• 39:25
  Speaker 9: have to lock up your cash, keep it safe for
• 39:27
  Speaker 9: two days, and only then only then can we use
• 39:31
  Speaker 9: it to give you your stock. And in the innim
• 39:33
  Speaker 9: period we have to put up our own firm cash.
• 39:36
  Speaker 9: So obviously in a situation where these where the buying
• 39:39
  Speaker 9: activity just goes parabolic, there's limits how much corporate cash
• 39:45
  Speaker 9: we can we can actually provide. And so what going
• 39:49
  Speaker 9: from T plus two to T plus zero would do
• 39:51
  Speaker 9: is allow us to essentially immediately do that that transaction,
• 39:56
  Speaker 9: so we wouldn't have to put up corporate cash for
• 39:58
  Speaker 9: two days. We could actually exchange exchange the cash and
• 40:03
  Speaker 9: the shares immediately. I don't know if the ice cream
• 40:06
  Speaker 9: analogy really helped, hopefully.
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: So I'm interested on your thoughts about meme stocks because again,
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: this is one of the things out a revolutionary right there.
• 40:18
  Speaker 5: Weren't meme stocks before.
• 40:22
  Speaker 3: Before we heard them about Robinhood and it was like, okay,
• 40:25
  Speaker 3: well this is synonymous.
• 40:26
  Speaker 5: Well this is the easiest place to get it.
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: And so this is kind of a twofold thing because yes,
• 40:31
  Speaker 3: more people are involved, right, I don't know how many
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: people access should I get game stop just randomly like
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: in the supermarket, people like I'm in game stop, I'm
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: a game stop. It does bring more people, but they're
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: newer investors, not always educated in a sense.
• 40:44
  Speaker 5: But the more customers that you have it does help business.
• 40:47
  Speaker 3: So what's your thought on the Meme stocks first, and
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: then I thought to myself, since it's kind of become
• 40:53
  Speaker 3: the home of the stocks because of the accessibility of
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: how quickly we can get access to these positions. Yeah,
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: we've seen AMC, we've seen GameStop, and now you're publicly
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: traded company. What are your thoughts about, like if that
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: happens to Robinhood stock itself, Like, what are your thoughts there?
• 41:09
  Speaker 9: Well, I would say if you look at the products
• 41:12
  Speaker 9: that Robinhood rolls out, my personal opinion is that, you know,
• 41:18
  Speaker 9: we'd like to encourage long term habitual investing. It's you
• 41:21
  Speaker 9: know over.
• 41:24
  Speaker 3: This episode is brought to you by P and C Bank.
• 41:26
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  Speaker 10: An illegal alien from Guatemala charged with raping a child
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  Speaker 9: Time compound, interest and compounding of returns says I'm sure
• 44:18
  Speaker 9: you guys, You guys tell your listeners is a very
• 44:22
  Speaker 9: powerful force. Einstein I think called it the eighth wonder
• 44:25
  Speaker 9: of the world. Compound interest. So just time in the
• 44:28
  Speaker 9: market and time spent investing over a long period of
• 44:33
  Speaker 9: time really really adds up. And so that's why we
• 44:36
  Speaker 9: encourage long term investing through recurring, through fractional diversification, through
• 44:41
  Speaker 9: fractional shares, and then of course education, making sure that
• 44:46
  Speaker 9: you know, we provide content not just to our customers
• 44:48
  Speaker 9: but to the broader world through Robinhood, learn, through in app,
• 44:52
  Speaker 9: through snacks and all of our other properties. So I
• 44:57
  Speaker 9: tell people and it's on our website. Now, Robinhood a
• 45:00
  Speaker 9: safety first company. That's our top value. What that means
• 45:03
  Speaker 9: is it means service reliability, right, it means education, it
• 45:09
  Speaker 9: means all the safeguards. So you know, we warn you
• 45:12
  Speaker 9: if a stock that if you're looking at, if what
• 45:15
  Speaker 9: a stock you're looking at is leveraged, if it's a
• 45:18
  Speaker 9: leverage et ETF or et AD, if if it's experiencing
• 45:23
  Speaker 9: unusual volatility, and then we provide all of the information
• 45:28
  Speaker 9: and the data that you might need. And of course
• 45:31
  Speaker 9: on top of that, it is self directed. So if
• 45:33
  Speaker 9: you want to make a decision to buy into a
• 45:35
  Speaker 9: recent IPO or something because it's you know, popular on
• 45:41
  Speaker 9: social media. You're you're free to do so, but we
• 45:44
  Speaker 9: do want to make sure you have all the information
• 45:46
  Speaker 9: and that we give you the tools to encourage that
• 45:49
  Speaker 9: long term habitual wealth building.
• 45:51
  Speaker 8: See you said something else, very interesting. You said it
• 45:53
  Speaker 8: was like one and a.
• 45:55
  Speaker 5: Three million or three point five million.
• 45:57
  Speaker 4: Yeah, but being that way in a new AI, each
• 46:01
  Speaker 4: and these things can continue to happen now because these
• 46:05
  Speaker 4: reddic groups and different things that nature are not going anywhere.
• 46:07
  Speaker 4: Social media is only getting bigger, more and more young
• 46:10
  Speaker 4: people are getting into invest in. So what if this
• 46:13
  Speaker 4: happens on an ongoing basis and it doesn't become a
• 46:16
  Speaker 4: one in three million, What if it becomes a one
• 46:18
  Speaker 4: to ten on a one hundred Yeah, what's your plan
• 46:21
  Speaker 4: of action to not have that happen again?
• 46:24
  Speaker 8: Well?
• 46:24
  Speaker 9: I think immediately, you know, raising the over three billion
• 46:29
  Speaker 9: certainly helped provide a cushion, but of course there is
• 46:33
  Speaker 9: some There is always a limit to how much firm
• 46:36
  Speaker 9: cash that any broker would hold. So you know, if
• 46:41
  Speaker 9: one hundred million or a billion people theoretically wanted to
• 46:45
  Speaker 9: buy the same stock at the same time, I don't
• 46:48
  Speaker 9: think the system would be able to handle that to
• 46:51
  Speaker 9: handle that currently, so we would need some some changes
• 46:53
  Speaker 9: to the underlying infrastructure of the markets.
• 46:56
  Speaker 4: Maybe because that's where TV government regulation changes a little
• 46:59
  Speaker 4: bit to help in that situation.
• 47:01
  Speaker 9: Well, yeah, I think the industry has already said that
• 47:05
  Speaker 9: they would support faster settlement, which is a big, a
• 47:09
  Speaker 9: big thing. So TI plus zero I think would take
• 47:12
  Speaker 9: a while. That's real time settlement, but one day settlement
• 47:15
  Speaker 9: gets us about half of the way there. So I
• 47:18
  Speaker 9: think steady improvements, steady improvements in the infrastructure are going
• 47:24
  Speaker 9: to be helpful.
• 47:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah, you mentioned you raised three point five billion. That's
• 47:28
  Speaker 4: extremely intervesting because it's like most of the time people
• 47:32
  Speaker 4: would think that that hurts your business, but you actually
• 47:34
  Speaker 4: raised and you actually got a lot more customers actually
• 47:37
  Speaker 4: after that too.
• 47:37
  Speaker 8: So what was your strategy?
• 47:39
  Speaker 4: Was it like just face it head on, don't run
• 47:41
  Speaker 4: from it, acknowledge what happened, and then go to investors
• 47:45
  Speaker 4: and say this is why we need more money to
• 47:47
  Speaker 4: invent these things from happening.
• 47:48
  Speaker 9: Well, it was kind of simultaneous, right, we were raising
• 47:50
  Speaker 9: the capital while we were explaining to customers and the
• 47:54
  Speaker 9: broader public.
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: What was going on.
• 47:58
  Speaker 9: And yeah, it was sort of like solving any hard problem,
• 48:02
  Speaker 9: you have to just you have to make sure that
• 48:07
  Speaker 9: you put the right people on it. And we have
• 48:10
  Speaker 9: a great team, you know, great folks and operations engineering. Meanwhile,
• 48:14
  Speaker 9: engineering is trying to keep the service up dealing with
• 48:18
  Speaker 9: all the influx of customers and all the activity. So
• 48:21
  Speaker 9: you know, everyone was working very, very hard at that time.
• 48:26
  Speaker 9: It was like all hands on deck close to twenty
• 48:30
  Speaker 9: four to seven without a break for very long.
• 48:32
  Speaker 5: We were just speaking about that.
• 48:33
  Speaker 3: I'm thinking to myself, like we were living it as
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: retail investors.
• 48:37
  Speaker 5: But what was that moment.
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: On day a week like for you as the co
• 48:42
  Speaker 3: founder of this company that has been since we say
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: social media, well street bets has gathered people and you're
• 48:48
  Speaker 3: like the social media of investing.
• 48:50
  Speaker 5: What was that day like for you?
• 48:52
  Speaker 9: It was a little stressful. It was a little stressful.
• 48:56
  Speaker 9: You think normally that you know, if you're number one
• 48:59
  Speaker 9: on the Apps store overall, it's sort of like it's
• 49:02
  Speaker 9: a great thing. But yeah, it's also you know, we
• 49:07
  Speaker 9: we're very cognizant to make sure that wanted to be
• 49:10
  Speaker 9: there for our customers, and you know it's on the
• 49:15
  Speaker 9: one hand, having so much activity that you know, you
• 49:18
  Speaker 9: need to raise additional capital to facilitate the trading is
• 49:22
  Speaker 9: a good thing. On the other hand, you know, there
• 49:24
  Speaker 9: was this like you know, not being able to having
• 49:29
  Speaker 9: to restrict the trading for customers. You know, that was disappointing.
• 49:33
  Speaker 9: A lot of customers were disappointed. And there were a
• 49:36
  Speaker 9: lot of false narratives. You know, you saw them all
• 49:39
  Speaker 9: over the internet. To this day, a lot of them exist,
• 49:42
  Speaker 9: you know, of collusion with hedge funds, and you know,
• 49:45
  Speaker 9: people people are i think, really interested in collusion. They
• 49:49
  Speaker 9: like to think that people are colluding. So having to
• 49:52
  Speaker 9: kind of dispel that narrative and say well, actually we
• 49:56
  Speaker 9: were just like doing what we could to operate within
• 50:00
  Speaker 9: within the regulatory framework and make sure everything was done properly.
• 50:05
  Speaker 9: But yeah, despite that, I think I think the false
• 50:10
  Speaker 9: narratives are sometimes so compelling that they just like keep going.
• 50:14
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 50:14
  Speaker 4: People would rather be believe a lot in the truth.
• 50:16
  Speaker 4: It's more entertaining.
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, let me think that's true.
• 50:19
  Speaker 4: Speaking about that, when you spoke in front of Congress,
• 50:23
  Speaker 4: I believe one congressman had asked you and they said, well, it's.
• 50:26
  Speaker 8: Free to trade.
• 50:27
  Speaker 4: But they spoke about the sell order flow market makers
• 50:31
  Speaker 4: and getting a piece of a spread, and they were
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: trying to say like, well, it's not really free to
• 50:36
  Speaker 4: trade because the market makers are making money, and it's
• 50:39
  Speaker 4: money every time somebody makes a transaction.
• 50:41
  Speaker 8: So what do you say to.
• 50:43
  Speaker 9: That, Well, well, they're talking about payment for orderflow, which
• 50:46
  Speaker 9: is one of the which is our main source of revenue.
• 50:50
  Speaker 9: And what I would say to that is payment for
• 50:52
  Speaker 9: orderflow is not new. I mean it existed when people
• 50:55
  Speaker 9: were paying seven to ten dollars per trade as well.
• 50:58
  Speaker 9: The broker would just make seven to ten dollars and
• 51:01
  Speaker 9: then in addition they would make the.
• 51:03
  Speaker 5: It was an additional cost, the.
• 51:04
  Speaker 9: Payment for orderflow. So yes, we do generate revenue. But
• 51:09
  Speaker 9: at the same time, it's never been a better time
• 51:11
  Speaker 9: to be a retail investor. And you know, it's it's
• 51:15
  Speaker 9: highly regulated. It's it's it's it's been regulated for a
• 51:22
  Speaker 9: very long time.
• 51:23
  Speaker 2: And basically there's there's rules.
• 51:26
  Speaker 9: So a lot of people say, you know, why don't
• 51:29
  Speaker 9: you send your orders to an exchange, Why don't you
• 51:31
  Speaker 9: send it to the Nasdaq or the nicey? Why are
• 51:33
  Speaker 9: market makers executing the orders? And market makers provide competition
• 51:38
  Speaker 9: for the exchanges, And there's actually rules that say in
• 51:42
  Speaker 9: order for a market maker to execute your order, they
• 51:45
  Speaker 9: have to actually beat the exchange price or beat it
• 51:49
  Speaker 9: or match it, and so as a customer, generally you're
• 51:52
  Speaker 9: getting a better price through a market maker. Market Makers
• 51:56
  Speaker 9: are still for profit businesses, so they generate revenue, and
• 52:00
  Speaker 9: you can think of payment for orderflow as a rev
• 52:02
  Speaker 9: share a share of the revenue that they make with
• 52:05
  Speaker 9: the broker. So we think it's it's it's a fantastic model.
• 52:11
  Speaker 9: I mean, it's led to commission free trading. It's led
• 52:14
  Speaker 9: to the lowest possible cost of trading for consumers out
• 52:19
  Speaker 9: of all developed at of all time. And you know,
• 52:25
  Speaker 9: it's led to the US markets being the most vibrant
• 52:29
  Speaker 9: capital markets for retail investors in the world. So we're
• 52:34
  Speaker 9: you know, we stand behind the business model one hundred percent.
• 52:37
  Speaker 9: And I think that people debate it and have been
• 52:41
  Speaker 9: debating it for a long time, in large part because
• 52:44
  Speaker 9: it's very complicated to understand. And I actually didn't understand
• 52:48
  Speaker 9: it in detail when I started trading. I didn't know
• 52:50
  Speaker 9: what you know, when I bought my first stock, I
• 52:53
  Speaker 9: didn't really know what a bid ask spread was. You know,
• 52:56
  Speaker 9: there there was a process of learning through some of
• 52:59
  Speaker 9: those things. So we've we've been trying to educate people
• 53:02
  Speaker 9: and share information about the revenue stream and and you know,
• 53:07
  Speaker 9: explain it a little bit better.
• 53:08
  Speaker 4: It's important because it's one of these things when people
• 53:12
  Speaker 4: are confused, then they can think that something is bad
• 53:16
  Speaker 4: or it just automatically goes negative. This is why explaining
• 53:21
  Speaker 4: is beneficial, because I think once people have a full
• 53:23
  Speaker 4: understanding of something, most people will say, Okay, everybody deserves
• 53:26
  Speaker 4: to make a living. This is America, Like you can
• 53:27
  Speaker 4: make money. Yeah, it's when, like you said, when people
• 53:30
  Speaker 4: are confused, and I feel like the financial industry for
• 53:33
  Speaker 4: a long time has confused people. Like you said, just
• 53:34
  Speaker 4: to bid the asks, right, like all of that stuff.
• 53:37
  Speaker 4: If you don't have background knowledge on it is very
• 53:40
  Speaker 4: confusing and your perception can be swayed in any direction
• 53:44
  Speaker 4: depending on who's telling you the story.
• 53:46
  Speaker 9: Yeah, I think that's true. It's the same. It's the
• 53:49
  Speaker 9: the simple lie in the complex truth again, right, when
• 53:54
  Speaker 9: the truth is complex as the financial industry is, people believe.
• 54:00
  Speaker 9: You know, people are also used to financial companies being
• 54:04
  Speaker 9: rent seeking and taking advent.
• 54:06
  Speaker 8: Advantage of people, so very lary of that.
• 54:09
  Speaker 9: Yeah, you remember the financial crisis of two thousand and eight,
• 54:12
  Speaker 9: and you know the way that that felt, right, A
• 54:16
  Speaker 9: lot of people lost their houses, a lot of people
• 54:18
  Speaker 9: lost their jobs. The government came in and sort of
• 54:21
  Speaker 9: bailed out a lot of these companies. Nobody really got punished,
• 54:25
  Speaker 9: and there was a lot of distrust. I think that
• 54:28
  Speaker 9: lingers from that time period. I mean, you remember the
• 54:32
  Speaker 9: Occupy Wall Street protests where people are just a little
• 54:36
  Speaker 9: bit skeptical about whether the old guard financial industry is
• 54:39
  Speaker 9: actually working for them, and I think some of that
• 54:43
  Speaker 9: A lot of that sort of persists to this day.
• 54:45
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: So I just want to go back really quick, because
• 54:47
  Speaker 3: we talked about bid and ask, and so a lot
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: of people are new to invest in, and so when
• 54:52
  Speaker 3: they see bidden ask, I'll try to explain it like this.
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: Like the ask like if you've went car shopping, right,
• 54:57
  Speaker 3: the ask is what they're asking you to pay for.
• 55:00
  Speaker 5: The bid is what you're willing to pay for it.
• 55:02
  Speaker 3: And so when is a difference in it, that difference,
• 55:04
  Speaker 3: let's say somebody that plays the market price or the
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: ass price, that difference between the bid is that's what's
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: going to the brokerage. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, okay, Yeah,
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: so I'll just break it in.
• 55:14
  Speaker 9: Well, it's actually the bid in the ask. Not all
• 55:18
  Speaker 9: of that goes to the brokerage. It's actually split three ways, right,
• 55:23
  Speaker 9: Some of it goes to the market maker, some of
• 55:25
  Speaker 9: it goes to the customer, which is what's called price
• 55:30
  Speaker 9: improvement over over the NBBO, and then a small portion
• 55:35
  Speaker 9: goes to the brokerage. And Bloomberg's done. Bloomberg Intelligence I
• 55:40
  Speaker 9: think recently had an analysis and the portion going to
• 55:44
  Speaker 9: the brokerage is typically much smaller than the portion going
• 55:48
  Speaker 9: to the customer and to the market maker as well,
• 55:51
  Speaker 9: and the customer actually gets the bulk of it as
• 55:54
  Speaker 9: price improvement according to that study.
• 55:57
  Speaker 4: Let me ask you, is you the first person that
• 55:59
  Speaker 4: we have spoken to it has taking a company public
• 56:00
  Speaker 4: and you just did it recently, So I have a
• 56:02
  Speaker 4: few questions.
• 56:02
  Speaker 8: Gratulations, thank you, yeah, congratulations for sure.
• 56:06
  Speaker 4: Okay, So was that always your idea to go public
• 56:11
  Speaker 4: or at what point did you realize, no longer am
• 56:15
  Speaker 4: I going to have a private company? This makes sense
• 56:16
  Speaker 4: to take it to the public markets.
• 56:19
  Speaker 9: I think I think we realized once we got to
• 56:22
  Speaker 9: a certain level of scale, and then once you get
• 56:25
  Speaker 9: to that scale, you realize Oh, this is a capital
• 56:27
  Speaker 9: intensive business. You know, we have these capital requirements, we
• 56:30
  Speaker 9: have these deposit requirements, and this we're growing very quickly,
• 56:35
  Speaker 9: and you know, accessing public markets is just a great
• 56:40
  Speaker 9: source of funding for the business. I think it was
• 56:44
  Speaker 9: also pretty clear that it was mission aligned and we
• 56:47
  Speaker 9: would like to figure out a way to allow our
• 56:51
  Speaker 9: customers to be shareholders. And the self referential nature of
• 56:56
  Speaker 9: Robinhood kind of a stock market company going live on
• 57:00
  Speaker 9: the stock market just made sense. So I think all
• 57:04
  Speaker 9: those things together made it made it sort of the
• 57:10
  Speaker 9: the reasonable.
• 57:11
  Speaker 2: Thing to do.
• 57:12
  Speaker 9: But the way we think about it also, it's kind
• 57:13
  Speaker 9: of a I mean, it's kind of just a financing
• 57:18
  Speaker 9: event if you think about it. We already, because we're
• 57:21
  Speaker 9: so regulated, have to share a lot of detail about
• 57:24
  Speaker 9: our revenue and our operations with the public, and so
• 57:29
  Speaker 9: probably the delta between Robinhood being going from private to
• 57:33
  Speaker 9: public and your typical other technology company is a little
• 57:37
  Speaker 9: bit smaller. So there're certainly changes, but a lot of
• 57:42
  Speaker 9: our activities and revenues were already transparent and shared on
• 57:46
  Speaker 9: a quarterly basis.
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, one of the things that I've heard you speak
• 57:49
  Speaker 3: on and be very proud of is having a large
• 57:52
  Speaker 3: allocation of shares advocate for retail investors. Was that something
• 57:57
  Speaker 3: that you as a team said, you know what, we're
• 57:59
  Speaker 3: built for the people, We want to.
• 58:01
  Speaker 5: Have people involved. Was that part of the thought process
• 58:03
  Speaker 5: when making that decision.
• 58:05
  Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, I think that was That was an easy
• 58:07
  Speaker 9: decision because you look back to our mission democratize finance
• 58:11
  Speaker 9: for all, and it's really all about giving things that
• 58:14
  Speaker 9: were previously accessible to relatively few, select rich people and
• 58:21
  Speaker 9: making them available to everyone. So like the original product,
• 58:25
  Speaker 9: commission free equities trading, that aligns with it. Commission free
• 58:29
  Speaker 9: options trading very much aligned with it as well, things
• 58:32
  Speaker 9: like high yield savings. And so when we got to
• 58:36
  Speaker 9: the IPO, I think it was clear that hey, why not,
• 58:41
  Speaker 9: you know, rather in addition to kind of taking our
• 58:44
  Speaker 9: own company public, why don't we try to democratize IPOs
• 58:47
  Speaker 9: as well. And that's why we launched a new product,
• 58:49
  Speaker 9: IPO Access, which actually launched before our own IPO, we
• 58:53
  Speaker 9: launched with a few other a few other companies. And
• 58:57
  Speaker 9: then that's really become a mechanism to give retail consumers
• 59:03
  Speaker 9: on equal terms access to IPOs as the institutions, so
• 59:07
  Speaker 9: they could get in at the IPO price, and you know,
• 59:12
  Speaker 9: get get access to those which would have previously been
• 59:16
  Speaker 9: available only to high net worth individuals or institutions or underwriters.
• 59:21
  Speaker 8: I want to ask you about that.
• 59:23
  Speaker 4: I was gonna wait till later, but as you brought
• 59:26
  Speaker 4: it up, let's talk about that as very intervesting.
• 59:28
  Speaker 8: Can you explain that a little bit more so?
• 59:30
  Speaker 4: What what exactly when does it exactly allow people to invest,
• 59:34
  Speaker 4: like right when it hits the stock market, right before
• 59:36
  Speaker 4: it hits the stock market? Like, what's what's the details
• 59:39
  Speaker 4: on it?
• 59:40
  Speaker 8: Yeah?
• 59:40
  Speaker 9: So, typically the IPO allocation happens before it hits the
• 59:45
  Speaker 9: stock market. So the underwriters and the company agree on
• 59:50
  Speaker 9: a listing price, and Robinhood currently acts as what's called
• 59:55
  Speaker 9: a selling group member. So we're allowed to give people
• 59:58
  Speaker 9: a portion of that allocate. We we give that to the community,
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 9: so they get in at the IPO price. Typically that
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 9: price is set the day before the stock actually starts trading,
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 9: and and you know, once it's it's trading, that price,
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 9: that price is a different price.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 4: Yeah, So it could be like twenty dollars a day
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 4: before than thirty five dollars when it actually opens.
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 9: It could be act opens and there is some risk.
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 9: Obviously it's not always going.
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 2: To be just lower, but.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 8: It could be, it could be higher.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 4: Yeah, but that's great that you're doing that, and that's
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 4: something that I think is really going to change the game.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 5: I think that's a game change.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 8: It's a game change.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 4: I want to actually also, is there any plans of
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 4: so we just got into the angel investing world ourselves.
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 4: A good friend of our, John Henry, shot out to him.
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 4: He got an insurance company named Loop and we put
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 4: some some money into that and a few other companies.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 4: So as we're learning more about these things, we realized
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 4: that stock market extremely important. Yeah, important engine to build wealth.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 4: But you talked about real, real massive returns is done
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 4: more so on the angels, like even way before a
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 4: company even thinks about going public. And there are some platforms,
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 4: you know, crowdfunding, but the large companies, all star companies,
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 4: they're not on those crowdfunding platforms. So have you ever
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 4: thought about finding a way to have regular people in
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 4: a crowdfunding type of thing, but being able to form
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 4: a syndicate to invest in early startup companies.
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 9: Yeah, so typically historically what's been the impediment there is
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 9: just the accreditation requirements. So for a long time, in
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 9: order to invest in you know, a hedge fund or
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 9: venture capital fund or private private company that's non non public,
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 9: you had to be an accredited investor, which has either
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 9: a net worth requirement or an income environment requirevironment for
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 9: wealthy people. Now, recently I think it was with the
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 9: Jobs Act.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 8: Yeah, President Obama, Yeah, Yeah, there.
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 9: Was Reggae Plus, which allowed some private companies to allocate
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 9: some portion per year that they could raise via equity
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 9: crowdfunding from general public. I think initially it was fifty million,
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 9: now it's seventy five. So there are mechanisms still a
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 9: little bit complicated, but I think there is an opportunity there.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 9: I think generally how we think about it at Robinhood
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 9: is selection is important. People want access to different investable assets.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 9: So we started with stocks. Then a lot of demand
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 9: for options, a lot of demand for cryptos as well
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 9: has led us led us to offer those on the platform.
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 9: So I think we'll continue to add to add more things.
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 9: And you know, there's lots of different assets out there
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 9: that are things that people want to invest in that
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 9: we don't.
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 4: For I want, I want to ask you, I want
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 4: to actually our crypto but before that, can we just
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 4: briefly go back to the bringing a company public? What
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 4: are some difficulties? I just want to give people, like
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 4: just a quick overview, because not a lot of people
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 4: are really familiar what it takes to actually take a
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 4: company public. I know there's regulation, is filings, and you
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 4: have to have the underwriter that actually underwrites the situation.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 5: I'm going to start an answer for him, stressful.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 4: Can you just get people a crash course in taking
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 4: a company public? Oh?
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 9: Let's see. So one thing that I've I've been told
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 9: is interesting but I didn't get to experience is actually
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 9: going to all the offices of the different investors and
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 9: like meeting them in person. So I was kind of
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 9: in the in the limbo period. You COVID is very
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 9: much still a thing. But we ended up traveling to
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 9: New York and we wanted to kind of get into
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 9: the get into the zone as much as possible. So, yeah,
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 9: it was funny. Rather than doing it at home and
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 9: completely over zoom as as a lot of people did,
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 9: we went to we flew to New York and did
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 9: everything in zoom out of the underwriters offices. So we're
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 9: in these conferences and stuff on zoom calls basically for
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 9: like ten hours a day, bring my blue tie in me.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 9: So yeah, it was it was a lot of work. Uh,
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 9: it took a lot of time. But you know, at
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 9: the end of the day, it was also uh when
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 9: when all was said and done and we priced and
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 9: we listed and we got it over, got it over with,
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 9: you know, it was it was pretty cool to be
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 9: there with the team in person, to be in New
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 9: York where Beaiju and I got started as entrepreneurs and
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 9: where I actually arrived as an immigrant to this country
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 9: when I was five years old. Yeah, with my aunt,
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 9: my aunt who was in her early twenties. And then
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 9: you know, seeing my parents at the airport. I had
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 9: seen my dad in I think a year and a
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 9: half at that point, I hadn't seen my mom in
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 9: six months. So it brought back, it brought back those memories,
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 9: and it was just a nice little moment along the journey,
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 9: you know. And a lot of people think, oh, you know,
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 9: the IPO, that's that's kind of the end, right, That's that's.
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 2: The end goal.
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 9: But it it didn't feel like that because obviously, well
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 9: we had earnings A couple of weeks later, so getting
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 9: ready for that, But I just think there's so much
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 9: left to build. Right Robinhood's still a US company. We're
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 9: still offering investment products, but we don't have IRA accounts,
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 9: we don't have the ability for you to have an
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 9: individual retirement account. So there's even within investing in the US,
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 9: there's a lot more that that we have to offer.
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I was watching so July. What was the July
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 3: that you guys be IPO officially in July twenty eighth,
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 3: twenty eighth, twenty ninth, so when you I think you
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 3: was supposed to get listed at like ten o'clock, but
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 3: that it took like maybe till two o'clock before I
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 3: feel like the public was allowed. What's happening during that time?
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 3: And as it I mean as a retail investor, I'm
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 3: looking at it like, what's just the co founder thing
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 3: about is it underwriting going on?
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 5: What's happening?
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 3: What's goin a time when you supposed to IPO on
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 3: the date and the time it actually goes public.
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 9: I think there were just like, yeah, it's still it's
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 9: actually not a fully automated process. So there's like shares
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 9: that are being exchanged and some kind of largely administrative things.
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 9: But yeah, during that day that that was all sort
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 9: of the accounting, finance, and legal teams, and you know,
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 9: my co founder and I were at the Nasdaq. I
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 9: think it was just like lots and lots of interviews
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 9: and then the opening bell ceremony. So you know my
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 9: understanding is, yeah, even though I wasn't in there, that
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 9: pretty typical to have, especially with a large retail allocation,
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 9: a lot of different investors.
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 3: For the actual this book took a long time. I
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 3: felt like I was the watchual shares. I was watching
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 3: the stop prices go up. But I'm like, we're gonna
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 3: get it at sixteen. No, it's at thirty four. No,
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 3: it's gonna open at thirty six.
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 8: At thirty five exact exactly exactly increase.
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 3: So it's before you go to that because I know,
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 3: I know you want to go to the crypto situation.
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 3: But you said that you reported earnings. Now that seemed
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 3: pretty quickly. Usually companies report after an entire quarter. Did
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 3: you guys even have a quarter before you reporting earnings?
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 9: Well, I think it's it's kind of on a it's
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 9: it's on a there's a there's a range. So because
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 9: we went public near the end of the second quarter. Uh,
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 9: there was actually, you know, a relatively short amount of
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 9: time between sort of going public and then reporting the the.
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 2: Second quarter A small glimpse. Yeah, okay, so I.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 9: Think a lot of a lot of the information for
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 9: that quarter was shared in the S one, so you know,
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 9: there was there was a little preview in there, but
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 9: it was more just the turnaround from kind of the
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 9: I p O to the to the earnings release, which
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 9: takes preparation, was was pretty short.
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 4: So let's talk about the future cryptocurrency. We think about
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 4: crypto currency in America. Coin base comes to mind. Would
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 4: you guys have some interesting news that you just recently
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 4: at least as far as I believe crypto wallet coming
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 4: obviously doge Coin is available on your platform. It is, Yes,
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 4: it became very very popular a few months ago. Was
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 4: really do you know I thought that this this dog room,
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 4: I thought that that might have to do something with dose,
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 4: but I understand that it was around before before the
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 4: doge coin craze.
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 5: I got a nominee that I'm thinking of to be
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 5: the dog.
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 2: But who's the nominee?
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 5: Talk about that? After?
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 8: Does he have long hair?
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 5: It depends on what he's talking to.
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 4: You know, you never know. So where where's Robinhood moving
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 4: in the cryptos? What's your plans for crypto current?
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 9: Well, so up until this year, there was actually a
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 9: relatively small team at Robinhood working on crypto, so we've
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 9: been hiring a lot and you know, we announced two
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 9: new product features recently, so the crypto recurring investments and
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 9: the Crypto wallets, which the wait list for the wallets
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 9: launched last week, and then I think on the same
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 9: day we announced crypto recurring out to one hundred percent
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 9: of customers. So I think that the value that we
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 9: add to crypto the reason why people enjoy using Robinhood.
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 9: It's kind of two things. One is the simplicity and
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 9: kind of the the ease of use of the product,
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 9: and then of course the fact that we're commissioned free,
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 9: so we're actually very proud of and we've been benchmarked
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 9: a number of times by third parties. You know, you
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 9: can see influencers that use multiple platforms, and we compare
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 9: very well. People generally get more crypto for their for
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 9: their money on Robinhood versus versus our platforms and those benchmarks,
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 9: So yeah, I think with wallets people have people want
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 9: to consolidate, so they in some cases have crypto and
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 9: a lot of platforms and want to bring it all
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 9: in one. And some people also, you know, have their
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 9: hardware wallets. They want to self custody their crypto and
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 9: you know, they have their their ledger, nanos or other devices,
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 9: and so we we allow for the ability to do
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 9: that or in some cases participate in kind of these
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 9: these DeFi ecosystems off platform so it'll unlock that and
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 9: then the crypto recurring a lot of these other platforms
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 9: they're charging you multiple percent per transaction, and with recurring
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 9: that adds up even more. Right, it's like three percent
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 9: four percent every transaction. Now you're doing it on a
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 9: weekly basis, it can be very expensive. And so robin
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 9: Hood recurring really leverages our commission free, commission free value
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 9: proposition because you can now recur without having to worry
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 9: about about a significant commission every single time.
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 3: As far as technology, I feel like you guys have
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 3: been ahead. Obviously you started as the app, but I
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 3: wonder how you feel about competitors. Are you watching what
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 3: they're doing and saying, oh, we can add that. I
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 3: feel like that's what we saw in Instagram. Like anytime
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 3: there would be a social media site, Instagram would say okay, yep,
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 3: well thank you for creating that, we'll do it better.
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 5: And so recently, no pun intended.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 3: Recently, coinbas said that they're allowing customers to direct the
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 3: positive checks into their accounts and even have it convert
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 3: into cryptocurrencies that their liking.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 5: What is that like?
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 3: Because I feel like they're obviously going to be probably
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 3: a main competitor in the US market, So how does
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 3: that work with competition in this space?
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 9: I mean, I think and a lot of respect for
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 9: for that company and Brian, great entrepreneur, great company. I
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 9: think again, our value proposition for customers is that we
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 9: we want to offer you a great price. We want
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 9: to be the best value for your money, and we
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 9: want you to think of when you think of Robinhood,
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 9: to automatically say this is going to be the best
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 9: customer experience and I'm going to get the best value.
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 9: And you know, I think that with the wallet's launch,
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 9: it's also important for us to encourage our customers to
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 9: practice good safety hygiene, so enabling things like multi factor authentication,
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 9: enabling you know, transaction monitoring for where they're sending their cryptos,
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 9: and you know, I think, uh, I think if we
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 9: can sort of own the uh, the user experience and
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 9: own the fact that we could be the best value
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 9: for your crypto, we feel, we feel really really good.
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 9: And other than that, it's, of course we'll pay attention
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 9: to competitors and see if they happen to be serving
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 9: customers in some ways better and learn from them. But
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 9: largely the north star is always that direct customer feedback. So,
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 9: you know, sitting with customers, going to their houses, bugging them,
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 9: really annoying them until they tell us, they tell us
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 9: more and more about what's bothering them and how we
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 9: can serve them better.
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 3: I'm gonna say I'm gonna say this not just because
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 3: you're sitting here. When we were starting our crypto journey,
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 3: we we downloaded around, but not if it starts with
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 3: it's for crypto. Just because the live ticker, it was
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 3: like the little heartbeat and you can watch the price,
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 3: I feel like it was like an eighties video game.
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 5: I'm like, okay, this is more up to date. It was.
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 3: It was a more of an accurate depiction of what
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 3: was happening in the crypto space because we know it's
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 3: very viold point.
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 5: We won't even going to sleep. It was like we
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 5: got to.
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 8: Watch this, So yeah, it's very it's very user friendly.
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, it's meant to be fast, for the interface
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 9: to load quickly, for you to get the information that
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 9: you need as quickly as possible, and of course, when
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 9: if you do want to make a transaction, for that
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 9: transaction to be to be smooth and for you to
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 9: get a lot of value from it. So those are
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 9: a lot of the design principles and really to to
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 9: meet people, to meet people where there are they are,
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 9: and to align with kind of the spirit of of crypto.
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 9: So it is twenty four to seven and you know
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 9: it's dynamic and sort of moving at all times. And
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 9: you know, I think the the sort of retro future
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 9: interface sort of affords affords that as well.
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 3: I think that's one of the things. Bloomberg had a
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 3: piece on it. I don't even heard the word of before.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 3: They said the gamification of investing, and it was almost
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 3: like in a negative context, it's almost like, you guys
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 3: have made it too easy.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 5: What do you say to that?
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 9: Well, I think it has been difficult for for a
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 9: long time. I think we reject the the sort of
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 9: analogy of investing to a game. We know investing is very,
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 9: very serious, but at the same time, you know, it
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 9: should be accessible to people. There's nothing wrong for people
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 9: to enjoy investing or to have fun doing it, right.
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 9: I think if people don't, they just wouldn't do it,
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 9: and then that's not good for anyone sport. Then yeah,
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 9: So you know, we're all about accessible, intuitive design and
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 9: making the design better and making our customers happier. And
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 9: I don't think that has anything to do with gamification.
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 4: Your mission statement is democratize investing in your robbin hood,
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 4: which the story of robbin Hood you took from the
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 4: rich and gave to the poor. How are you staying
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 4: true to that mission statement? And do you have a
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 4: worry like you know, now obviously you're publicly traded company
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 4: and you're part of Wall Street where it was once
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 4: like you know, Wall Streets attagonist. Now you're part of
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 4: Wall Street. So how do you feel about that? Like,
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 4: how do you feel about staying true to your core
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 4: mission statement?
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 9: Well, we are still in Silicon Valley, so I think, yes,
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 9: we are a public company, we have shareholders, but you know,
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 9: I wrote in my letter that you know, we're not
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 9: a company that's gonna sacrifice the long term wellbeing of
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 9: our customers to make our quarter or for any other
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 9: short term gains. So it's a very long term focused company.
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 9: And there is a lens. So our top value I
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 9: mentioned earlier, safety first. Our second value is participation is power.
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 9: And so participation is power means at Robinhood, the rich
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 9: don't get a better deal. So if you're if you're
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 9: a normal customer, you don't get you don't get better
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 9: customer support, you don't get higher quality service, you don't
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 9: get lower prices the more money you have in your account.
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 9: And I think IPO access is a good example of
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 9: that because not only do we put retail customers on
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 9: a level playing field with the institutions, but every customer,
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 9: regardless of how much money they have or how valuable
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 9: they are to Robinhood, gets an equal an equivalent sort
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 9: of odds and an equivalent shot to participating in the IPO.
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 9: So it's it's ingrained in our values and it's something
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 9: we consider whenever we build products. And it's cultural in
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 9: the sense that you know, if people do feel like
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 9: we're encroaching on a decision that favors wealthier customers, rich people.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 9: If it's like a non participation is powered decision, you'll
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 9: see people advocating very fiercely against it and kind of
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 9: rejecting it culturally. And I think it's one of those
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 9: things that we're we're very proud of as company builders
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 9: that it's sort of ingrained in the fabric of how
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 9: we operate.
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 5: I like that participation is power. We already say.
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 4: Safety first, since that's all model. Safety first is really important.
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 4: The best offense is a good defense.
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 9: There you go, it's the best defense is a good
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 9: offense too.
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 4: Though it's too shit, he's good. But it's been on
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 4: or Before we leave, I want you to have an
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 4: opportunity to say anything that you would like to sell.
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 4: I would love for you to talk about the educational
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 4: resources if we talked about that briefly. But you guys
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 4: definitely have a podcast which is near and dear to
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 4: our heart, and you have I believe, courses on investing
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 4: right and you like teach people about investing on the platform.
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 9: Yeah, we have a couple of different areas where you
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 9: can learn about investing. So increasingly we're finding ways to
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 9: put digestible content in the app. But we also have
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 9: robinhood Learn with the goal of taking you from kind
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 9: of the basics of what is a stock, what is
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 9: an ETF all the way to more advanced options trading
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 9: and and different strategies there and then uh and then
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 9: snacks as well, so you know, each of those things
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 9: were we're making a lot of progress in. And you know,
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 9: recently we partnered with Operation Operation Hope and became the
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 9: sort of first broker to sign onto the Investor's Bill
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 9: of Rights and you know, standing up for investor education.
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 9: Financial literacy is something very important for us. We'd like
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 9: to see that taught at earlier and earlier ages.
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 4: It's funny you say that, I don't know if if
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 4: you know how background, well, you know, that's what we
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 4: started in the classroom, teaching financial literacy. Yeah, Joy used
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 4: to be a teacher, so we used to have a
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 4: program where we actually taught financial literacy and that kind
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 4: of led to what we're doing now. But the classroom
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 4: is always nandad or heart, so financial literacy is right
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 4: up our ali obviously, so it's great to see you
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 4: guys doing that. If we could have a work together
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 4: on that that would be amazing, man.
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 2: But absolutely.
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 9: You know, in fourth grade, I remember taking a financial
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 9: literacy class and you know, some of the lessons there,
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 9: because they were so simple stay with me to this day.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 9: Like I remember they taught me. You know, it's basic
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 9: things like when you're writing a check, start all the
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 9: way on the left that way. You know, nobody can
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 9: take the check and put like one in front of
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 9: the number.
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 4: And you know, it's so crazy because I feel like
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 4: in America, depending on what school you go to, depending
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 4: on where you live, your experience is going to be
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 4: vastly different.
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 8: So you said you learned how to write a check
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 8: in fourth grade.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 4: We would teach we were teaching fourteen year olds fifteen
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 4: year olds financial literacy, and one of the lessons was
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 4: we had a mock check and we said, if anybody
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 4: can write a check correctly, we didn't give one hundred
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 4: dollars something.
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 5: Like that, the whole table.
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 4: For the whole table, take fifty dollars if you add
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 4: it up. Long story, sure, nobody was able to do it. Wow, nobody,
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 4: not one person. The reason being is that they were
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 4: never taught. Yeah, so it's like you said, you learned
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 4: it in fourth grade, so and it stuck with you
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 4: your whole life. Unfortunately, a lot of people are never
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 4: taught not just how to write checks, they're never taught
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 4: about real estate, they're never taught about stocks, they're never
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 4: taught about anything. So now they're just fumbling through life
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 4: making a ton of mistakes. But they were never taught
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 4: financial literacy. It's still mind boggling to me. While financial
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 4: literacy is not a core curriculum and every single school
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 4: across the country is optional, more and more schools are
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 4: starting to pick it up, but there's still a lot
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 4: of schools where financial literacy is not taught. Financial literacy
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 4: was never taught in any school that I went to
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 4: my whole entire life, including college.
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 5: One school, well, the big Why University. It's called the biggest,
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 5: the biggest school.
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 4: So yeah, I'd say that to say that it's extremely
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 4: important the message of financial literacy to not only be
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 4: spread in the private sector, but in the public sector
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 4: as well, and for schools to start adapting financial literacy
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 4: at the young age and make it mandatory. I feel
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 4: like it's just as important as math and reading is
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 4: right up there.
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 9: Amen couldn't agree more. It's certainly been, you know, as
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 9: a mathematician, more practically useful in some ways than any
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 9: of the advanced math that I took in grad school.
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we've been saying that, I'm like, why am I
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 3: going to use my pket baggery them?
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah?
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 4: Yeah, Well what would you like would you like to
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 4: sell if he win? Anything else that we didn't cover
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 4: that you want to let people aware of, or any
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 4: new developments. I know you got twenty four to seven
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 4: customer service coming, so with some final words you would
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 4: like to leave the people with.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 9: Yeah, well, I think twenty four to seven customer service
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 9: are is something incredibly important for us, something that you
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 9: know goes hand in hand with safety first, Right. We
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 9: have to make sure that we not only provide a
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 9: high quality service that's available to customers when they need
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 9: us the most, but that when they have issues where
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 9: we're there for them. So proud to be live across
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 9: all issue types with customer support, and we're going to
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 9: continue to go where our customers take us and and
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 9: strive to deliver new products that are that are on
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 9: line with with our values and build the safest and
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 9: most culturally all of it financial product in the world.
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 4: Safety First ladies and gentlemen. First, I love U on
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 4: Troy Housekeeping Items.
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 3: I first like to say welcome to our newest EYL team.
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 5: I'm Minora. Can we clap it up? He real quick?
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 3: And I'd also like to shout out all our earners
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 3: on Patreon dot com. I know it's all proud to
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 3: pay program and all our people at EYL University. Our
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 3: team is growing, not just the students, but the actual staff.
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 3: Our family is growing. So shout to everybody. Shout over
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 3: the ten thousand earners at the n Eyl University, and
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 3: shout to the entire merch team Bam Smithy, the entire crew.
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 6: Man.
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 3: You know we're spilling some new colors this year. It's
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 3: that time of year to get the new season involved.
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 3: So shout out to y'all. You know how we play
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 3: this lover is love.
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 4: Yes, So shout out to Nora. I know she's been
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 4: working tiresly with Mike can make this happen. And thank you,
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 4: and thank the whole robin Hood staff for the hospitality,
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 4: very welcoming, beautiful campus.
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 8: Very glad to hear zen He's yes, you can't. We
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 8: just can't walk in.
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 5: I'm just saying sometimes we gotta. They were like, we
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 5: want to tell to you.
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 4: Yeah, So thank you again for the hospitality anytimes. It's
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 4: been a pleasure and we will see you guys next
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 4: week later.
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 5: You don't know who we know.
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 6: Yeah, my graduates from my school being forced back drop drop, Mike,
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 6: drop backdrop.
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 10: An illegal alien from Guatemala charged with raping a child
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 10: in Massachusetts. An MS thirteen gang member from Al Salvador
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 10: accused of murdering a Texas man of Venezuelan charged with
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 10: filming and selling child pornography in Michigan. These are just
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 10: some of the heinous migrant criminals caught because of President
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 10: Donald J. Trump's leadership. I'm Christy Noman, the United States
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 10: Secretary of Homeland Security. Under President Trump, attempted illegal border
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 10: crossings are at the lowest levels ever recorded, and over
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 10: one hundred thousand illegal aliens have been arrested. If you
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 10: are here illegally, your next you will be fine nearly
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 10: one thousand dollars a day, imprisoned and deported, you will
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 10: never return. But if you register using our CBP home
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 10: app and leave now, you could be allowed to return legally.
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 10: Do what's right. Leave now. Under President Trump America's laws,
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 10: border and families will be protected.
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 2: Sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security,