Vlad Tenev
Appearances
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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He was an economist in Bulgaria and he was always like, well, if you're good at math, You can kind of do anything. So all of this other stuff, like, you know, language arts, you know, you'll figure that out. Math is like the thing. And there was also a little bit of a competitive element because I would be like, oh, dad, you know, how old were you when you figured out like this type of math?
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Like, when did you learn calculus? And he was like, oh, I learned calculus when I was in graduate school. I was like, all right, I'm going to do it in seventh grade. Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Did you succeed?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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No, maybe it was like 11th grade or something. Pre-calculus maybe. Then I started doing it outside of school. I started doing all of these camps. There was this one camp called CTY. I don't know if you've heard of it. I did that in middle school. And basically the way it worked was you take the SAT. So the SAT is the... Yeah. for any listener who was not American college entrance exam here.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Um, I think it's required again now for a while. It wasn't required, but basically you have to take it to get into a good college. And for this camp CTY, um, You basically took it as a middle schooler. And then, you know, depending on how well you did on this test, you could like qualify for certain classes. In eighth grade, I got a pretty good score. I think I got a 1370 and I'd skipped a grade.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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So I was like a... a younger eighth grader too. And at that point, you know, I had this math teacher in my middle school and he had to like sign some stuff to have me go to this camp. He's like seven 70 on the, on the math and the SAT, like that's higher than I ever got, you know, when I was in college.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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So I think at that point I just, I kept getting this reinforcement that, you know, I was really great at math. I should, I should keep doing it. And I guess Stanford, how I came to Stanford was an interesting story. The second vacation that my family took after we moved to America, they took me to California. And my dad was like reading all these travel books.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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And he had this book like the thousand and one places to see before you die. And a lot of them were on the West Coast. So like the Grand Canyon and Sequoia National Park where you could drive your car through this like big tree I don't know if you've seen pictures of that but we drove through the tree and we kind of did this road trip through California and
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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there was this one day where we drove through San Francisco and we spent the night there and it was the middle of summer and it was raining. It was like close to zero degrees Celsius. So I had to actually buy a jacket because I was just unprepared for this. Um, And so kind of this miserable day. And then we drove down to Stanford, which was in Palo Alto, about 45 minutes south of the city.
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And everything cleared up. The sky was blue, not a single cloud in the sky. It was sunny. There were like, I think summer school was in session. So kids were like throwing Frisbee at the oval. And there were like kids picnicking in the main quad. And I just remember it felt so idyllic.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Particularly juxtaposed against how horrible San Francisco was that day that I was like, this is where I want to go. Like my parents have been spending all this time talking about college. This seems like a fantastic college. So back then I wanted to be a lawyer. So there's this photo of me on that road trip in front of the law school at Stanford. And I'm like, yeah, this is where I'm going to.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to listen, learn, and grow about how you can become happier, healthier, and more healed. We talk about everything from personal growth to finance, relationships to business. And today's guest is someone who has built something truly culturally phenomenon. And I think a lot of you may be using the product already.
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I'm going to go and be a lawyer. I had seen A Few Good Men, you know, the Tom Cruise movie. I thought being a lawyer was so cool because you get to like really get the people with like these intense arguments. I think I always remembered that even when I applied for college. I applied early to Stanford as a result. But the lawyer thing I kind of grew out of.
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Let's take a short break to hear from our sponsors.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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All right. Thank you to our sponsors. Now let's dive back in. Was Robin Hood the story ever a part of your early life? Or was that just a name that stuck out as a name in and of itself? Yeah. Did you watch the cartoon when you grew up or did you read the book? I did.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Yeah. No, I watched the cartoon. I was a big fan of that. And of course, Men in Tights was another great one. Yeah. The origin of Robinhood, the name, was... You know, the finance industry had a bad rap in the early part of the last decade. Mm-hmm. Still does, really. Still does. So, you know...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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A lot of you definitely have heard about it. And a lot of you may have a lot of questions like I do. And so I'm so excited to have on On Purpose, Vlad Tenev, the CEO and co-founder of Robinhood. Vlad is a first-generation immigrant from Bulgaria. In 2013, Vlad co-founded Robinhood and pioneered commission-free investing with an intuitive mobile-first interface.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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My girlfriend, Selena, my wife now, but my girlfriend at the time, she was kind of like, she started dating me. I was this entrepreneur. I had this idea. And she had to kind of explain to her friends what I was doing. And she was like a doctor and medical researcher at the time. So that's very interesting. concrete thing. Her friends were mostly researchers and doctors.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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So she was like, well, Vlad, he's in finance. But then there'd be this groan, like, oh, they thought I was some kind of investment banker or something. She's like, no, no, no, but not that kind of finance. They're like the Robin Hood of finance. They're trying to help the little guy, giving them tools to invest and manage their money.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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And so when we were kind of coming up with the name, that was a name that we got excited by. And there were a couple of other names too. Like we thought about naming the company Omaha, actually. And we got pretty close to that one. And in hindsight, you know, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were never big fans of Robinhood. They were kind of like crapping on us from time to time publicly.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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So sometimes I think if we had named the company Omaha, maybe we wouldn't have had that element. I'd also never been to Omaha. So that kind of like, that sealed it for me. So Robinhood was a very controversial name. And I think that's what made it powerful because you either love it or you're kind of like repulsed by it to some degree, but it's not boring.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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It doesn't sound like a normal finance company.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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It doesn't sound like a finance company. And I think in hindsight, that was a really good thing because It's just memorable and it's like emotionally gripping. And the name itself kind of tells you a lot about what the company stands for and what the products should like help you achieve.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Yeah. How old were you when you first started investing?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Yeah. You know, it ties into what we were talking about earlier. I was at home during the summer because, you know, my parents were working and I spent a lot of time with computers. And one of the early things I discovered was like building a portfolio on Yahoo Finance, actually. And This was 1997, late 90s. Wow, early, yeah.
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So during the dot-com boom, when somehow, I don't even know how I came across this, but I was building a portfolio of companies that I recognized, like Yahoo, 3Com, which made the Palm Pilot, one of the first consumer PDAs at the time.
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PDAs, oh my gosh.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Yeah, I remember PDAs.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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well ahead of their time, right?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Yeah, very.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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I did decently well. In hindsight, everyone was doing well on all those stocks for quite a long time because it was the dot-com bubble. But my parents basically saw an opportunity to motivate me to do well on the SAT to qualify for this camp that we were talking about earlier. So basically, they were like, if you get above... I think it was like a 1300 on the SAT.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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We will let you invest with like the dollar amount of your score. It was something like that. And so, you know, I was like very motivated by this. And so when I got my 1370 and my dad and I kind of he funded an E-Trade account for me and I started investing.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Today, Robinhood has more than 23 million funded customers and over 119 billion assets under custody. Please welcome to On Purpose, Vlad Tenev. Vlad, it's great to have you here.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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No way. Do you remember your first investment?
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Yep. Yeah. I bought 3Com, the company that made the Palm Pilot. My feeling was that this device was so interesting and they had started giving them out to my parents, who by that point were working at the World Bank. And I was like, all right, well... If the World Bank is using them, this must be a company that is growing and they'll probably be around for a while.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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And plus the device was just super cool. Pretty soon after my dad brought it home, he didn't know how to use it. So I just took it and started playing with it. And actually through that, I learned a lot about investing because what happened was there was a spinoff. So first it started as 3Com, but then this Palm pilot business was growing and they spun it off.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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So then I had two stocks and then I started getting the prospectuses in the mail and voting documents. And I learned all about like shareholder proxy voting and all of the stuff that a normal 12 year old probably wouldn't. wouldn't have occasion to learn about. But because I was invested, I actually felt compelled to learn more.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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So yeah, I think that really set me off on a lifetime of learning about investing in finance.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Yeah, how much did you make or lose?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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At first, I was up quite a bit. Then in 2000, I think my portfolio dropped to maybe like 20-30% of what I started with. And then I think it probably took another 10 years beyond that for that portfolio to be in the green again. But I mean, I would say it's the great thing about getting started young in general, not just for me.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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You have plenty of time to actually like make up for the mistakes and, you know, compounding over a long period of time corrects a lot of mistakes. So I think generally speaking, the earlier you can get started, the investing, the better.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Thanks for having me, Jay.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah. It's fascinating hearing about your own investing journey. And starting at 12 is pretty young. I mean, that's pretty impressive that you were able to compute and factor that in. Have you ever taken an IQ test? Do you know your IQ?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Yeah, really, really fascinating journey you've been on, personal and professional. I think our audience and community are going to get a lot of value to understand more about the investing world from you. I wanted to start off with a question because your pre-founder life is actually fascinating in terms of how you even got involved.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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I have not, no.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Okay, yeah. I was intrigued. Yeah. Just based on everything you've been saying, I'm just like, it's rare that I've met someone who's felt that they've always excelled since an early age. That's not as common an experience anymore. Yeah. I don't know if you meet people like that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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I mean, I do think that Stanford in particular is kind of an interesting amalgamation of people. So you have a lot of people from like... diverse modest backgrounds uh that come to stanford and usually those people have like excelled academically which is pretty amazing and then you also have people that uh come from like wealthy families from all over the world. Yeah.
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I think some people consider that to be not ideal. Like maybe it should all be merit based and everything, but I think it actually has worked fairly well because what happens is, um, the folks from modest means that have like really high horsepower get to make connections and you make connections with all of these people and it kind of unlocks business opportunities for you.
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So, you know, a lot of the folks that I met in my undergrad and the different types of people, I think at the time I kind of didn't recognize this, but they ended up
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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helping me in my business career, either because they became journalists that helped tell the story of Robinhood, or they joined venture capital firms and they became indirectly or directly investors in Robinhood, or they advised us with certain things. I think everyone is so diffuse in general because people grow up in different places, but college is one of those moments that
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people get brought together and you do in a place like Stanford in particular, get to encounter a lot of really special people. And when I came to Stanford, I actually had no conception of going into business. I kind of stumbled into that later. By the time I got to college, I was interested in theoretical physics.
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That was my passion because I was consumed by this question of why are the laws of the universe the way they are? I had read about relativity when I was in high school, and I was just like... The first time I read Einstein's book of special relativity, it just blew my mind. And I had to read it like six or seven times to figure out what was going on. And then you try to understand more and deeper.
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And the question that really motivated me was like, Why do the laws of gravity look like this, but all the subatomic particles, all the laws around particle physics look different? And is there one theory that is basic that unifies both of them? This sort of unification of quantum gravity was this topic that really interested me.
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And I wanted to ask you, what's a childhood memory that you have that you feel has impacted the work you do today?
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So I came to Stanford to study that, and that's kind of what pushed me into it. into eventually doing math and going to UCLA to study math with a professor named Terry Tao. But if you think about that group of people, the folks at Stanford who come to study theoretical physics, And you don't do that because there's very little money in it, particularly back then, right?
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This was like pre-data science and applied machine learning. So yeah, actually, by the time I got to that point, I was looking around and I'm like, wow, I'm the dumbest person here. These are just, I'm surrounded by like some of the smartest people I've ever met.
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Wow. And how did you get distracted from that?
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I was here at UCLA studying math, and two things happened. The number one thing was when I decided to go to graduate school, and I think my bubble of the academic world kind of burst a little bit because I had this romantic notion that You would kind of spend all of your time thinking about difficult problems and just like being creative. It's almost like being an artist.
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If I think about the childhood memories that... I have that stick out. They're all kind of like somewhat traumatic, I would say, but I think I had a very happy childhood by and large. Like I wouldn't trade anything, but my childhood was full of significant change. So a couple of the memories that stick out was going to the airport for the first time.
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Like maybe there's not much money in it, but you spend a lot of your time just like practicing your craft, right? But then I was given this book. It was called like The Mathematician's Survival Guide. And it was like chapters about how to deal with the administration and the bureaucracy of the graduate department and
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how to advocate for yourself with the department chair, how to make sure that you get a good research fellowship so you don't have to spend all of your time teaching undergraduate classes. And I think at that point, I was like, oh man, like this is a career and it's not like the career that I wanted. Another thing happened at the same time. So my first month in grad school was September of 2008.
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And Lehman Brothers went under that month. It was a start of the global financial crisis. You and I are basically the same age, I think, born in 87, right? Yeah, 87, yeah. This was kind of like... Maybe for you, for me, certainly like my, the folks that graduated my year of college, some of them went to finance and some of them even went to work at Lehman Brothers.
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And it was sort of like one month after they joined, you know. there was like photographs of them carrying their stuff out of the offices and boxes. Right. So yeah, that was a tough time for, for a lot of people. A lot of my friend's parents lost their jobs that year. So it was the global financial crisis. And, um,
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Yeah, somewhat oddly, my good friend from college, whose name was Beju Bod, who I ended up starting Robinhood with, he had gotten a job in finance kind of on a whim. And he managed to convince me that this time was the best time to start a finance company. And of course, I wasn't like super committed to my PhD path because of all the other stuff I mentioned. So... I was like, you know what?
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This sounds like an interesting problem. Let's see if we can do something here. So we rented a little house in South San Francisco, in the South Mission, where we were paying like $300 a month in rent. We were all living together. I had to take care of this lady's cats, which was why the rent was so cheap. That was kind of my first experience with entrepreneurship.
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What attracted me to it was kind of the same thing that attracted me about math and physics. It was the act of creating something with... You didn't really have to...
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listen to anyone telling you what to do uh you could use your entire mental faculties and your creativity to like determine your own success and your outcomes you know just like a couple of people who are really passionate and committed could build something and you know actually use it as a vehicle to sustain themselves economically so um that idea when I kind of discovered it.
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And I never really like thought of myself as an entrepreneur before. I mean, it wasn't really something that was common in the East coast, to be honest, or in Bulgaria. I mean, you had some, um, but not technology entrepreneurship really. And then when I kind of started doing it, I started like programming and writing code. Then I just like found the whole thing really intoxicating. So, um,
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Even though we didn't have success, basically our first idea failed within a year. I just kind of knew that I wanted to do it. So that gave me the confidence to drop out of UCLA, start something a little bit different. And it was the third idea that we had that led to Robinhood. And that was kind of the one that really worked best.
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I think that the actual experience and the mindset of an entrepreneur just resonated with me very, very deeply. I was having so much fun, unlike anything else that I had done, that I just knew I had to keep doing it.
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I grew up in Bulgaria, a very small country in Eastern Europe. I was born in the 80s, which was a time of communism. So... It was sort of like there was the West and then the Iron Curtain and not a lot of back and forth travel. My first time to the airport was actually after the Berlin Wall fell. Communism in Bulgaria had kind of collapsed or was on the verge of collapsing.
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Yeah, I mean, democratizing investing is such a, at least at the time as well, was such an ambitious goal to think about trying to get... the average person to be able to have access to something that wasn't accessible to them just a few years before, especially in a place that seemed volatile. You needed a lot of capital to get started.
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I want to do a bit of investing basics for people who are listening who may or may not be using your platform already and want to understand a bit more about it. If someone's sitting there going, and I remember being this person. So I remember 2013, I'd just left the monastery that I lived in for three years, and I'd gone back into the world of work.
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And I had a mentor who told me exactly which crypto to invest in, in 2013.
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Which one did he say?
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Well, at the time he was like... Dogecoin? No, no, definitely wasn't. At the time it was like Ethereum, lithium, like... Oh yeah, Litecoin. Yeah, yeah. And so he was mentioning all these places. And I remember in 2013 with very little capital, very little investment knowledge.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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You see now, if someone said my mentor and what did you call him?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Yeah, mentor, yeah, mentor, yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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If now someone's like, oh, my guru told me which cryptocurrency to invest in, I would be like, hey, you should be a little skeptical of this mentor. But in 2013, that was actually like... I should have listened. That was before the space got a little... a little corrupted before the pretenders came in.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Yeah, no, he'd been successful in tech investing and things for years. And I'd met him, he was, I was what, 26 at the time? He was 55. Oh, wow. And so he'd been around, he was a very smart, thoughtful person. I didn't really understand anything about investing. And I grew up in a family where we didn't have a lot growing up. There wasn't, I didn't see my parents invest. I didn't see them have that.
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And so I remember being like, He was just like, just put $1,000, put $100 into each of the 100 pounds. I was in London. So he goes, just put 1,000 pounds into 100 pounds into each and just see how it goes. And I remember being so risk averse that I didn't even want to put 1,000 pounds into it. And that's probably all I had at that time.
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I was working a job where I made 31,500 pounds a year at Accenture. And I could have- You were in the UK, right? I was in the UK, yeah. I could have put 1,000 pounds in. I didn't. If I did, it would have been a great investment. But the question I'm asking is, a lot of people don't invest because they don't have enough knowledge, but they also feel they don't have enough money.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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At what point should you feel confident and comfortable to start investing? What amount? And yeah, let's start there.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, I mean, a lot of Robinhood customers start with as little as $10. And I think that was actually the innovation that Robinhood unlocked. So before we came into the mix, you used to have to pay a trading fee. And if you started in the UK, you probably paid a trading fee at 2013 as well. I mean, still do. That market hasn't gone zero commission yet. Let's say you have to pay $10 per trade.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Well, that's, you know... if you make $100 investment, that's 10% of the actual value in the investment. And if you want to sell it, you know, then that gets to 20% for the round trip. And so it doesn't really make sense to start with $100 in that sense, because you have to count on many years of appreciation to just pay for your transaction fee.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
But if you lower the fees to zero, you could start with any amount.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Which is what you did.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Exactly. And that was kind of our big... That was sort of one of the three big innovations that I think made Robinhood possible and really made it take off. It's eliminating the commissions and lowering the account minimums to zero. Because a lot of brokers also had account minimums. You couldn't even open an account unless you had $2,000 or sometimes more in there. And we said, you know what?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
We really wanted... And the reason, by the way, that... they had these account minimums, was these companies were not automated enough to service small accounts. They would just lose money on them. And so we said to ourselves, well, it would be... It would not really uphold the mission of a company named Robinhood to have an arbitrary account minimum. We should make it zero.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
We should hold ourselves to that standard. And we just should like... incent ourselves to make the business as efficient as possible, because I think that would be the long-term correct way to build the business.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
My father was given an opportunity to... to go to the U S to study, which was, you know, the, the events that kind of conspired to allow that to happen could not have conspired at an earlier time. Right. But, you know, he had to go by himself because we just didn't have the money to like send even my mom with him, much less my mom and me. So he kind of,
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Like, let's point everything towards creating a forcing function for us to be more efficient and more automated and adopt technology more aggressively and be the first to do it relative to the market. And
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
A company where everything is pointed towards using technology to lower the cost of things, make things as usable as possible and as automated as possible, that seems like a long-term robust structure for a company. So we kind of like that. But yeah, a lot of customers start with just $10 or even less.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And what would you say are the three biggest mistakes new investors make when they don't know what they're doing?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I think this is a little bit strange given so much of Robinhood, at least in the public realm, is meme stocks and meme trading. But I think probably the biggest mistake one can make is buying something just because someone on the internet bought it. thinks that you should buy it and is posting it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I'm personally a big believer in thinking for yourself and buying something because people on social media are saying it's a good idea. It's just kind of anathema to me. Sure, use it as a signal, but make your own decision and kind of think through it yourself and don't just rely on the opinions and commentary of others.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Any others? Big mistakes that people make?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I think just waiting to get started. Now, particularly with the tools, There's, you know, with Robinhood kind of entering the market, not just Robinhood, but most of the competitors that at least survive in the space. There's no maintenance fees, no kind of onboarding fees. Keeping money in the savings account works. Where in particular now with high rates, a lot of the banks are offering you 0%.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So your money is just losing money sitting in savings. Not doing the simple things to optimize, I think, are mistakes. And there is so much free content out there on the internet, on YouTube, and everything.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
That just spending even 30 minutes to get educated and actually just getting started and opening an account and creating the habit of investing, even if you don't think you have much money, the technology is there so that you could actually do the exact same things with... $1 as you can with thousands of dollars. And, you know, through another thing, Robinhood pioneered fractional shares.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
You can invest any dollar amount in pretty much any stock. You don't need a whole share. So one of the first things that we did, which we thought was very cool, was... You have, for example, companies whose share prices are hundreds of thousands of dollars per share, like Berkshire Hathaway A shares, for example.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And, you know, they would almost pride themselves on having this share price that's inaccessible to normal people. And not everyone could be invited to this club of like... shareholders and they have the annual shareholder meeting. But Robinhood figured out how to break up these stocks into pieces. You can buy a dollar of it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And then you had all of these retail investors showing up at the shareholder meetings. And I think that made those guys very angry, actually, in hindsight. But it was very satisfying. How did you even pull that off?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
How's that even possible?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, it was a big technical challenge. Yeah, big technical challenge. Basically, what happens is the company has to keep inventory in all of these names. And you imagine like... Let's say, I mean, the way that this works is probably a little bit more complicated, but to simplify it, let's say you want to buy a dollar of Berkshire Hathaway.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Well, then we would essentially have to keep inventory of a whole share and then allocate internally different pieces of it. And then, you know, when the total sum exceeds one share, then we go out and buy another one. So we're kind of like managing this portfolio of... right around one share in every instrument. And then we can just do that through technology.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
went off by himself to see if he could make it and make a new life for us and kind of this new land. And I think they were trying to prepare me for this because I was an only child. And The weeks leading up to it, my parents were like, your dad's going to America. You're not going to see him for a long time. And it ended up being, I think, about two years before I saw him again.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I mean, we have great engineers and data scientists and brokerage experts that can manage the system.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
If you were to say that for a new investor, there's certain factors they should understand about a stock before investing, what would you say are the three key things that they should know and amount of information they should have before they go in and put any amount in?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I guess without giving people too specific investment advice because I'm kind of not really allowed to do that. I'm a big proponent in investing in companies that create products that you like and use.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
If you use the product, if you think that the company that's making those products is improving the products, and if you're bullish on it continuing to be useful and you think it's trending in the right direction, that's been sort of my philosophy. It's how I got started too.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And I think that's why if you look at the Robinhood customer base, and we're now publishing the stocks that our customers are investing in most, we call it the Robinhood Investors Index. It tends to be consumer companies that make products. They're sort of like heavy in innovation. So for example, Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, these are some of the most commonly invested stocks.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And it's because our customers are younger. They believe in the future. They tend to be early adopters of technology and innovation. They believe in artificial intelligence, clean energy, electric vehicles. So yeah, those tend to be like... Both sort of like some of the most held instruments and some of the first instruments that people kind of buy into.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
We also have a product, First Trade Recommendations. And it's difficult for the service to recommend individual stocks. But for someone that actually comes in and they say, you know, I just want to invest. I don't really know. I don't want to pick my own stocks. Over time, we're increasingly... getting better and better equipped to serve that customer.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So now you can just answer a couple of questions and we'll recommend a diversified portfolio of ETFs, explain to you what all the pieces are, and then you'll kind of see how it all works mechanically. And I think sometimes just going through the process of making a trade, it's much simpler than reading a book on it. I like to say that it's like playing a violin.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
You're not going to learn to play a violin really well by reading a book on how to play the violin. Maybe if you're already really, really good and you're trying to get a little bit better, understanding the theory behind it is going to help. But otherwise, it's just sort of like pick up the thing and start practicing and you'll get better the more you do it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
One of the things I became interested in when I was an undergrad is options trading. A lot of my students my year were applying to be options traders. That was like a... Before it went fully electronic, that was a job that people had, right? And there was this book, like Options, Futures, and Derivatives. It was called something like that by Hull.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And it was like this thick dictionary explaining how all these options strategies worked. And I just kind of imagine, you know, if someone had to understand that book before kind of like Going into options trading or discovering it for the first time. I think that would be just like an incomprehensible barrier. But like you build up some intuition for these things by doing it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And it's sort of like makes you more motivated to read the literature. And it also sort of like. gives you more real world knowledge than you could ever get from just reading. So I think just like getting started and doing it is the most important thing. It's a skill like playing a sport or playing a music instrument more than just like an academic pursuit.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah. How many of you users do you find going beyond just that first trade? Do you have a percentage of users that you know go beyond their first or second trade and kind of continue on and build and grow versus like they tried something out and kind of just said, oh, it's not for me. I don't know what I'm doing.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
With consumer technology, there's sort of a funnel for everything. You know, there's people downloading the app. Not everyone who downloads the app actually ends up creating an account. Not everyone that creates an account funds it. And, you know, we're definitely focused on making sure that we have a really good funnel, that it's clean, that people who...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
you know, enter are getting exactly what they want. I'd venture to say that our funnel is probably much more efficient than those of our competitors. That said, there are things that certain customers want that We're not like ideal at offering now. So for example, if you want an advisor, a lot of people want a financial advisor.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I'm not a very emotional person. I've kind of been described as stoic. I wasn't a very emotional child. And I just remember like... when we got to the gate and I, uh, and my dad kind of like went to the other side and, uh, I wasn't like allowed to, to cross because of course I didn't have a ticket.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
They want someone to manage their money for them, tell them exactly what to do. We don't have a great comprehensive solution for that yet. Although we're working on it, I think we will get there eventually.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
What are the AI advisors or?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I think AI certainly will be involved, if not replacing the advisor, certainly augmenting and giving them superhuman capabilities and the ability to service more customers. But yeah, I think that's certainly one of the most interesting applications of AI in financial services. But yeah, right now, the platform is very self-directed. It's for folks that want to be in control of their money.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And the most hardcore Robinhood users are the ones that really are just kind of like...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
optimizing everything you know they're optimizing their taxes they're optimizing all of their fees and commissions and we we do attract some of those people that are really want to be hands-on with everything because it's a very easy to use tool we have we tend to have the lowest pricing across all uh services that we offer we sort of like from the very beginning have uh
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
built with the self-directed retail customer in mind. So I think for that customer, there's probably no better fit. If you want to be in control over every aspect of your finances, and you actually, in some cases, are openly distrustful of other people telling you what to do. And there's a lot of people like that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
They're like, I don't even want to listen to a financial advisor because I feel like they're just going to talk down on me in a good scenario or rip me off in like a bad scenario. And those people are like, yeah, like they tend to gravitate toward Robin Hood.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from our sponsors.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I just like cried and bawled my guts out because it kind of sank in that I wasn't going to see him for, for a very long time. That's probably one of the, one of the biggest memories, another memory, you know, perhaps a little bit more relevant to Robin hood was, uh, After I had moved from Bulgaria to the US and we had gotten enough money to have a vacation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And now let's get back to the episode. At a time when investing is becoming more talked about, more diverse, there's more options. I want to get your personal opinion on people thinking about stocks versus people thinking about property, for example, which of course is far more expensive.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
But I feel like we've seen a generational shift from people wanting to own their homes, purchase their homes, get a mortgage versus now people moving towards renting more. are you seeing that trend and are you seeing people move towards stocks? Are you still, what's your personal take on people choosing between buying and renting versus using that capital elsewhere?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
For a while, the American dream involved home ownership.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yes.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Right. Um, And I have mixed feelings about it, to be honest, because there's a lot of corporate interests that are pushing for more homeownership. I mean, if you're a bank and you're giving people mortgages, a lot of people criticize leverage in the stock market. But if you think about the amount of leverage in a 30-year fixed mortgage, it's like... ungodly.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
You end up paying much more in interest than even the principal sometimes. Yeah, I mean, again, without getting into investing advice, real estate, I think, has been tempting for people because you can see it, you can touch it. It's sort of like...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
This thing that you can use and it feels like an investment, even though it really isn't, especially when you take into account all the fees, like the brokering fees on either side of the transaction, property taxes, maintenance fees.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Meanwhile, in the stock market, you have it on your phone now, commission-free, some of the lowest fees, access to the widest variety of companies that are really, even though it's the US market by and large, the US market's increasingly global. I think, and I wrote this article back in 2021, investing in the global markets is really the new American dream.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And actually, during the hyperinflation episode in Bulgaria in the 90s, my grandparents um didn't have access to any tools that allowed them to invest in equities so uh my grandfather who was a medical doctor on navy vessels in bulgaria he had like a contact on the port side who would basically give him access to copper cookware so he would
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
take his Bulgarian lives from his pension and get copper cookware. We had this closet. They had this closet in their apartment that was just full of copper cookware. And that was their Robinhood app. That's where they would self-custody their wealth. I mean, right now you can buy any stock. You can buy crypto. We started offering crypto in 2018 for the lowest fees in the industry.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And of course, the only place to go back on vacation was to see my grandparents back in the home country. So we'd gone back. And I remember the exchange rate of the currency, right? It used to be sort of like... to Bulgarian level for $1, but I came back and it was $2,000.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And you can get, you know, You can get access to ETFs. You can have gold ETFs. So really in your pocket, you can diversify and hold pretty much any asset. And you can even do real estate through the form of REITs and other publicly traded ETFs. Yeah, you can get exposure to that asset class. But like real estate investing in terms of buying a primary home
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, I think the story behind that is difficult. It's like very illiquid, high transaction fees. You're kind of like picking a particular neighborhood. So even if the global real estate market does well, something could happen to that neighborhood. You build a power plant next door and you're kind of in big trouble. Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Even though I'm not making any investment recommendations, I think it's hard to equate those two. I think really the future is going much more toward investing in publicly traded stocks and cryptocurrencies.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah. Yeah. That's what I wanted to ask your opinion. So yeah, definitely not official advice. I read an amazing stat that said the next generation is set to inherit an estimated $72 trillion over the next 20 years with 27 trillion going to millennials alone. Yes. And that blows my mind because first of all, I'm like, who are those millennials?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
That's a big wealth transfer.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
It's a big wealth transfer. When someone like you hears that, what goes through your mind?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
What goes through my mind is there's a big opportunity for Robinhood. There's a big opportunity for us because we've got more millennial app users than basically all the incumbent brokerage competitors put together, even more so Gen Z. I think if you look at Gen Z, over 60% of our competitive set just uses Robinhood. And so we already have relationships with these folks and we're offering more.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Like we don't just offer stocks. We have an awesome credit card. We have among the best retirement products, an amazing retirement product with the first built-in match in an IRA. We have a high yield product and we're adding just more and more over time.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And we're making it really easy to transfer your account if you're a customer of a legacy brokerage to Robinhood so you can take advantage of all these amazing offers and rates and the user experience. So yeah, I think that we'd like to put ourselves in the position where Robinhood is like the home for all of these assets. And I think we're rapidly getting there.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So Bulgaria had gone through this incredible period of hyperinflation, where the inflation of the Bulgarian level was the highest in the world. This was 1996, and I think 1997 as well. I think there were two years. And so my grandparents' pensions were just worthless. Everyone in the country was struggling.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
What do you think you've done differently to attract those groups and those communities into your space? What's been the big difference?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I'd like to say that the way we communicate and the marketing is a big part of it. But I think the biggest thing is... like the economics, getting rid of account minimums and trading commissions, removing the friction, these are all barriers that prevented people. Yeah, I think I mentioned to you earlier that before Robinhood, if you had... $100, it would have just been nonsensical to invest.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
The fees would have just ripped apart your portfolio. And a lot of times there were barriers that prevented you from getting started in the form of minimum account balance requirements as well. So we got rid of all of those. And basically that allowed a whole bunch of customers that were previously underserved to be able to open accounts online.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And, you know, unfortunately, a lot of those customers were from disadvantaged historical demographics. And, you know, I think it's a great thing that we've now kind of opened the doors to basically everyone to open up an account and become an investor.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Similar to the property question, I wanted to know your take on traditional retirement accounts like the 401k in comparison to the more aggressive growth strategies in stocks. What's your take there again from an opinion base?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, so 401ks are fantastic for those that are privileged to have an employer that offers one. And in particular, if an employer offers a 401k with a built-in match and they're matching your contributions, that's free money. So that value prop is very, very strong. But not everyone has access to that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And so what we've done is, and actually I think over time, users and kind of end consumers can be less reliant on individual employers. And it used to be that you would have a job and you could like count on that employer's pension to take care of you. You know, maybe you'd work at the same employer for 20, 30 years, then you'd retire and you would kind of subsist on the pension plan.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And then, of course, Social Security kind of filled in some of the gaps. But I'd say the future of Social Security is very much shrouded in a cloud of uncertainty, right? So I think the upshot is people have to take it upon themselves. to be responsible for their own finances and their own retirement. I don't think that you can rely on the government.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I don't think you can rely on any one employer. Many people aren't sticking around at a single employer for very long now, right? And so what's important is having these investment accounts not tied to the employer and actually tied to the user. You're kind of carrying around your retirement with you. And that's why we launched our IRA products, your individual retirement accounts.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So we offer Roths and individual retirement accounts. If you're a Robinhood Gold subscriber, you get a 3% match on contributions. So basically... You might not have an employer matching you, but Robinhood will match out of our own economics. In a world where you can't rely on a single employer and you have these accounts that should travel with you, I think that it's much more future-proof.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And I think those early moments were when I developed this like visceral understanding of how important money was, because I think to a kid, money's maybe not so important. But to me, you know, my parents were new in the country. They were just like getting started from scratch, basically starting from zero. And I always felt like every decision, every family decision had this like layer of like
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And the product's really been resonating. We had... End of 2023, which was the first year that we launched our retirement products, we had about $1.7 billion in assets under custody. And that's gone up more than 6x since the beginning of the year. So now we have close to $10 billion in assets in retirement accounts at Robinhood.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Was that a more recent development? Or was that something that was always part of the plan?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
We had always talked about offering retirement products. There's just – I mean the financial space is so big and there's so much that we want to do that the like order of things becomes important and which – what's first. And, you know, there's sort of like always a balancing act between innovative new features that you don't find anywhere else but Robinhood.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And those are things like our 24-hour market offering, which allows you to trade stocks 24 hours a day. And we were the first to market with that for individual stocks like Tesla and Nvidia and Apple. Things like retirement accounts that others offer, but, you know, we'd have to kind of like catch up and add them. And of course, we try to put our innovative twist that matches onto them.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And then there's just scaling the infrastructure, and that includes things like customer support and just making sure that the infrastructure gets more reliable and sophisticated to handle more. Which, as we're expanding globally and servicing other customers in different countries, is also a giant area of investment for us.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
It's so interesting, isn't it? Because I feel like you're seeing all these new disruptive platforms, technologies give people so much opportunity that wasn't accessible before, but often they come under even more scrutiny and challenge than banks or anything else did in previous years. I was wondering what your take on the GameStop movie was. I don't know if you saw it. Did you get to see it?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I saw some clips of it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Okay, you haven't watched the full thing.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
No. I mean, I saw the clips that I was in, of course. I wanted to see how I was portrayed. Certainly not out of vanity or anything like that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Did they have to ask permission for that?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
No. It was kind of the weirdest thing. Your likeness and name can just be kind of taken and monetized. And I don't think the movie made very much money, but yeah, they certainly didn't ask for permission.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Right. And then when you saw the clips of you in it, how did you feel? Like, how did that...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I thought they kind of got my mannerisms right. I mean, it made sense because I think they probably looked at interviews that I'd done and, you know, they basically had figured out sort of like my way of speaking and, uh, You know, the actor that played me was a very good looking guy. You know, the Winter Soldier.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I think they had to kind of make him look a little uglier so he could more accurately portray me. But hey, I'm not complaining. The plot was obviously like complete fabrication. I think people really liked this whole conspiracy theory thing. And, you know, there was this like conspiracy theory of collusion floating around, particularly at that time.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I don't think they could actually explicitly say the conspiracy theory, but they were just evoking it in all sorts of ways. So those parts were fictional, but I think they got my mannerisms right.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And then, I mean, I saw you do at the time, you did tons of interviews. I think you did a clubhouse with Elon and there were a bunch of different things that I saw that you did at the time. What does it feel now reflecting back on that time? Because I imagine that
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
there was so much scrutiny there was so much conspiracy there was how how have you felt about it since then like now you can look backwards eye on it I guess as opposed to at that time where you were looking right at it what's changed over the last three years yeah you know from time to time I do look at like some old clips um of of my interviews back then and
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
You know, I kind of feel bad for myself because I was like a little kid, you know. The company was private. I was always, particularly at that time, I was just very focused on getting the technology to work. And I didn't really want to be in the public eye. And I certainly didn't see myself as...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
some kind of political figure wrapped up in some kind of political quarrel over investing or regulation. I think what happened was GameStop, for better or worse, put Robinhood firmly into the zeitgeist. Before it was a little fringe. I mean, we still had a lot of customers, but we weren't we weren't like a politicized brand.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
How much money is going to be spent on this? How important is it? We have to like... choose like the, the budget potato chips or shop at shoppers food warehouse rather than Safeway because they have like the dented cans and stuff like that. So I think from very early on, um, I got this understanding of like the importance of money and saving it and protecting it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And I think at that point I really had to learn really quickly, not just how to like build technology and lead teams to do it, but also how to represent the company. And, you know, it's like,
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
can see in those interviews i'm kind of like reading a script and that was my approach to interviews for a while it was like reading my points and trying to communicate the facts of the message but um you know now now i know now that i'm much more wise and mature and uh still not nearly as uh as experienced as you you've probably done thousands of these right but you put
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
it doesn't really resonate with our audience to just like read the facts. You have to give some emotion and some feeling and have some empathy. And, you know, there has to be a little bit more. So I've had to kind of learn all that stuff. And now they just look incredibly inauthentic and robotic. And I think the more time has passed, the more I'm kind of trying to
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
be as authentic as possible in my appearances. I think that had to be, had to be something that I learned, um, and doing so, especially in that time where the stakes were super high and we were about to go public and, um,
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
You know, you have like all sorts of advisors and lawyers and, you know, professionals that are trying to protect me and the firm saying, don't say this, be careful not to say this. Be careful when you're kind of making this point that you don't make people think that you're actually meaning this.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So if you're kind of running the algorithm through your head of like what you can't say and what you should say and how what you're saying could be kind of like interpreted.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
It's exhausting hearing that. Exactly.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, eventually to some degree, like you practice enough and it becomes second nature and you can kind of rip up all the guidelines and be pretty confident that you're doing the right thing. But I think it has to be authentic. And back then I was just like very inexperienced at all of this stuff. I sort of undervalued it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And I think it took a while for me to get to like a basic level of competency and
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's fair. I think that every founder goes through that journey of like, you've been building something in private in a room or an office for so many years and all of a sudden your company gets notoriety in mainstream culture. And then all of a sudden you're having to do things that you don't necessarily set out to do as a founder.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I feel like even actors go through that where you're just working on a movie on a set and then you have to go promote the movie. But Or you're seen in public and something impacts the movie and that wasn't necessarily what you signed up for. What were the actual ramifications or consequences of all of that? How did that actually affect Robin Hood apart from the cultural propelling?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Well, I think a lot of people who were just looking at me at the time and maybe were... not Robinhood users themselves. Maybe some of them were Robinhood users, but others were kind of thinking about it and were aware of it. I think some people got the impression that I just like... maybe didn't care about our customers.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And I think that was the part that actually like pained me and kind of stayed with me over time. They're like, oh, look at him. He doesn't have any emotions. And he's just like talking about these clearinghouse regulatory requirements, but he doesn't understand the pain that kind of customers went through, wanted to You know, by GameStop or AMC or all these other things.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And that, that was, that was just like driving so many of the decisions that my parents were making on a daily basis.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I mean, like, I definitely understood the pain. Those were some of the most painful, sleepless nights for me going through that whole ordeal. But yeah, my approach was always just... I don't want to like talk about doing stuff. I like to do stuff.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So I'm not going to like, maybe I'm not going to be like super emotive with my customers, but I'm just going to build them great products that save them tons of money and give them a great experience so that they can learn to invest and manage their money effectively. I think that was painful. Obviously the collusion narrative was painful because it was like false.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
It was never proven. There was no, there was no, it was disproven.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I mean, learning how to communicate and actually like, um, to some degree, like going through a crisis and then surviving and then sort of like learning from it and, um, building back better so that you don't actually repeat the same thing again. I mean, Robinhood's had our share of issues over the years. We definitely haven't been perfect. But one thing I'm proud of is...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, thanks for sharing both of those, actually. They're such unique perspectives. With the first one, what was it like when you reunited with your dad after two years? And the last time you saw him, you were absolutely in tears.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
they're all like, we've made mistakes, but they're a, they're a series of original mistakes. So we tend not to make the, you know, same mistake twice. And so like throughout all of these, we've just like built up a ton of scar tissue and learnings and have been a much stronger company.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And I think all of this, all, all of the crises, you know, I remember the dates, you know, it's like, you know, it's like January 28th, 2021, or December 12th, 2018, or, you know, March 2nd, 2020, right at the beginning of COVID when we had a day-long trading outage. So you kind of remember all of these events and kind of take different things away from them.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
But I mean, at the end of the day, we've been a company for 10 years. And if you're in a disruptive space where... you're kind of challenging the status quo and trying to change things. Some people are going to be unhappy, right? And you have to have thick skin to kind of get through that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic, isn't it? When companies are doing something for the first time, it's inevitable that there's going to be mistakes and mismanagement and challenges. And I think
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And it's almost like, you know, if you're being too careful, if you actually make zero mistakes, you might not be successful. You're probably not going to be successful because you're just like not pushing hard enough. Like it's like he... At some point, not taking any risk is the biggest risk of all, particularly in a hot competitive market. So you have to know the right amount.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I remember that very vividly, too, actually. Yeah, because I landed in JFK Airport. I was five years old. And it was my first airplane flight. And I remember I was just puking my guts out that entire flight because... They were serving some food on the plane, and I was traveling with my aunt, who was 15 years old at the time, and she was a punk rock teenager. She loved American music.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I think it's somewhat of a fine dance. But it's certainly not acceptable to play everything super safe in the world of business.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And I guess the challenge is because it's dealing with people's money. It's even a more heightened.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
There's a heightened sense of safety. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and people can be very emotional about their money.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
But first, here's a quick word from the brands that support the show.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
All right. Thank you to our sponsors. Now let's dive back in.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
What were some of the biggest mistakes that you felt and the lessons you learned from them that were so pivotal that you think would be useful for other founders, for customers to hear, for other people to just be aware of like, this is how you now look at it versus at the time when you're like, well, we need to be risk, pro-risk, try things out.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Designing our infrastructure, uh, with scalability in mind from day one probably would have saved us quite a bit of grief because we've had to like rewrite and like redo multiple times. The conventional wisdom is you don't want to prematurely optimize anything. The Silicon Valley sort of like tombs are littered with corpses of startups that had perfect infrastructure and no users, you know?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So it's always hard to do the counterfactual on these things because like, If we had over-invested in those things, maybe we wouldn't have customers. No problems, but no customers, right? I think we can end up being tormented by our past too much. So I don't know how helpful it is.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, that's an interesting take. I can see why. I can definitely see why. I mean, the only thing that stood out to me was you saying that your most difficult period was in 2022 when Robinhood's business took a hit amid the market downturn. Yeah, that's true. And I feel like... What was so tough for you personally about that? I mean, yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Some people might hear that and be like, that's crazy. Like, how can that compare to GameStop, right? I think the thing about GameStop was it's like very acute difficulty. And it was almost like a roller coaster ride. It's intense, but it's over in three minutes. And it's kind of clear what you have to do to get out of that difficult situation. And we navigated it. We became a stronger company.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
2022 was like a slower burn, right? And we had just gone public in middle of 2021, kind of at the end of the window. The window has kind of been basically shut since then for IPOs, right? And we kind of squeezed in right before things got really bad. And so what happened was...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
She had her Walkman on. She liked Nirvana and grunge. She later settled in Seattle, which I think made a lot of sense. But anyway, they brought us the food and the plane, and... You know, it's funny you think plain food was like just this trash. You don't want to eat it. But I thought it looked amazing. So I just kind of like engulfed all of it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
You had this period where it became clear that inflation was getting completely out of hand and that freaked everyone out. And then it became clear that the Fed was going to hike rates. And we had kind of like everyone was prepared for a multi-year period of like zero rates.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And to tame inflation, the Fed, who hadn't really dealt with inflation for 30 years, had to hike rates up at the fastest pace in the past several decades. And what happens was when rates go up – People typically invest less because you imagine if you can get 5% on your cash just sitting there and the stock market appreciates 7% to 10% each year pre-tax and you can get that 5% rate increase.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
without taking on market risk, that becomes much more compelling relatively. So you'll have less investing. And then that's what we saw. Less people were interested in opening up brokerage accounts and investing for the first time. And that was like our whole business. That was the core of our business. And we didn't really have anything for a high rate environment at that time.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And, you know, there was some criticism of this when we went public and some questions, you know, the analysts and investors would be like, well, Robinhood, you've done really well during COVID and during this extended period of zero rates, the company has gone to 20 million users in that time. But how are you guys going to do in a... where the interest rates are higher.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Is Robinhood a zero interest rate phenomenon? Of course, we had answers to that. But until you prove that, people don't really believe you. And so we actually had to like... go through an incredibly challenging process of changing the strategy of the company, effectively re-founding the company in 2022 when the entire macro environment shifted. And I think we did a really good job.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I mean, within six months after that, we had gone adjusted EBITDA positive. In 2023, we had gap profitability at the first time. We now have eight business lines that are generating $100 million in revenue or more. So the business is very diversified. More than half of the revenue is interest rather than transactions.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And now we're starting to get the question, wow, Robinhood is doing so well in this high interest rate environment. The Fed's going to cut rates. What are you guys going to do when the Fed cuts the rates? And you can't You can't have these like high interest rate revenue streams firing on all cylinders now.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So now we have to go backwards and prove that customers still would want to trade options and crypto and equities.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
It's been interesting. Yeah, it's funny how it just keeps oscillating between or cycling, I guess.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Well, the more times you do that cycle, I always felt like when we were private, every time we raised a new round of funding, we had to kind of like reprove ourselves to these new investors that came in and just didn't understand the company. But then, you know, the longer we lasted as we got up to like... Series H, I think, in private funding.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And by that point, the Series A, B, C investors had developed such a deep understanding of the company. They had so much trust. And I think it's the same with a public company, or at least I'd like to think so. You pick your investors, your investors pick you. And the more cycles we go through, we are building institutional knowledge as a public company. And I do think that
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And then, of course, that led to me puking my guts out. And so I didn't have a very fun plane ride. So I felt a little off coming out on JFK. And I hadn't seen my parents in a long time. It was like... I spent the majority of the past year living with my grandparents. My dad first went, then my mom joined him later, and then I joined with my aunt. And so I was very shy. It was almost like...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
You know, the market is starting to recognize that, hey, maybe this founding team, the management team of this company knows what they're doing. And the more cycles we go through, I think the more we'll prove that out.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, and I think I've read somewhere where you were saying that that time really changed how you looked at being a CEO and a leader and reprioritizing the company. You just talked there about almost what you did in terms of building product, diversifying income streams, having all of the portfolio of how people could use Robinhood.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
But what was that like for you internally from a leadership perspective? What changed about how you led?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, so there was this exercise that I would go through with some of my team where I would imagine if a new person came into the role as CEO. And I've told this story a couple of times. And it's not like I imagined myself being fired or I was worried about that or anything like that. But it was almost like...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
okay, this thought exercise of, let's say I didn't come with any of the baggage of like having founded the company and made all the decisions to get us to this point. If I could look at it from, with a beginner's mind and just say, hey, I'm here, I'm seeing this company, this is kind of the state of affairs.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
what would i do differently and you know i came up with a a bunch of things uh that like a stereotypical like top ceo coming in would would do differently they would pull back on remote first and get people in the office so they could collaborate and work together in person and even though i turned robin hood into a remote first company not too long before i
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
reversed my own decision there which was kind of tough from a self-consistency standpoint people have a very hard time being inconsistent with their prior selves so i think that's like one mental barrier to get past um another one was i just made this realization that you know if you look at our business a lot of our revenue is generated by relatively small component of very active traders.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And we actually weren't building products specifically for them. And as a matter of fact, we looked at kind of this customer base very deeply in 2022. And these folks tend to be more sophisticated.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So actually, when the markets are crashing or moving sideways, they tend to actually be more resilient because they can deploy more sophisticated strategies that can take advantage of all sorts of market environments. And what we saw was the more active someone traded, the Ergo, the more revenue they generated for us, the less happy they were with Robinhood.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So actually, our most active customers had the least customer satisfaction with the platform. So then when we kind of like grokked this, we were like, this is a five alarm fire. Like any healthy business, you don't have to be an MBA from Wharton to realize that your most valuable customers being like unhappy with you is a big problem.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
But what was remarkable was when we kind of like shifted focus towards making these active traders really, really happy, we fixed it like that, like much faster than I thought possible. I think within six months, we had basically like... solve the problem. Yeah, it's kind of interesting, a lot of introspection to how we ended up sort of like ignoring the active trader audience for so long.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I think once we sort of like refocused on that and really started treating them like the important constituent part of the user base that they are, the company just started doing much better. I think by and large, that was the biggest part of our turnaround as a company since going public.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
That's fascinating. I mean, to discover that your deepest users are unhappy.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah. It must be like such a... Yeah, and part of it was like Robinhood was historically very targeted, very focused on the first timers. We want to be someone's first brokerage account. We want to make it as easy as possible to get started with $5, right? But what happened was...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
One, a lot of the people that got started with us then became really sophisticated and wanted more advanced tools and had more specialized needs, but still loved Robinhood and loved the simplicity and the ease of use of the interface. But the other part was, if you think about our options trading platform, for example, we're one of the... Very few that offer options trading for no contract fees.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
meeting strangers. You know, of course I knew they were my parents, but after not having seen them for a while, I was like kind of hiding behind my aunt's leg and I would stick one eye out and get a look at them. And there's this picture of me in the parking lot of JFK airport. when they kind of like showed me the family car for the first time.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Most of our competitors charge 65 cents per options contract. So if you trade 100 contracts, that's $65. That's real money. And there's some active traders that... spend thousands of dollars a month on other platforms paying these contract fees. So even if the platform's not really built for you, there's a really strong economic incentive to use it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So you had a lot of these super active options traders that were using Schwab or E-Trade or others. Maybe they're using their charting from their other platform, but they're putting the trades in via Robinhood just to save fees. So We grew active traders. We also had some using us because the economics were so good.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And that way we sort of like built up this large active trader business incidentally while building products for first-time novice investors.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I mean, it's so interesting that since the beginning, everything you talked about from the name, there's always been people who've been disgruntled, slightly angry, as you said earlier, like this feeling of like, oh, these guys are doing something, you know, has that kind of like, has that kind of changed now as a company matures and like people see you become established and not obviously competitors, but when you look at the people that
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
who felt that way initially, do you find that founders are reaching out? You're more connected to people and as you've become more established as well, or does it get lonelier as things go on?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Well, I think in different ways, it does get lonelier. But I would say in general, I think in the past couple of years, especially, we've fixed more problems than we've created, hopefully. And so our customers generally have been getting happier and happier, not just the active traders, but the great thing when you fix things for active traders, they're like power users of the platform.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So the customer experience for a more casual user improves as well. So yeah, fortunately, again, knock on wood, We've been avoiding major catastrophes in the last few years, which the last few years have been hard just with standard business challenges to work through. So that's been really nice.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I think to some degree, I don't expect Robinhood to ever be perfectly understood and non-controversial. So it just comes with the territory, I guess.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
What's made you comfortable with that? I feel like that's obviously always hard. We always want to be liked. We want what we create to be, you know, overall seen in a certain way. What's made you comfortable with that?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Well, I think the first time that, for example, I saw negative press about Robinhood, probably it was like 2018, 2019. So for the first four to five years of the company's existence, it felt like everyone was kind of rooting for us. Like the regulators were fans, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, I remember our first FINRA exam. We had, you know, someone kind of looking at what we were doing.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
FINRA is our primary regulator. And, you know, this was a young guy. He's like, hey, there's never any like new brokerages filing. This is like super interesting. I wish you guys luck. It gave me this feeling of like, wow, every investor and person I talked to is like, wow, run as far away from regulation as possible. You don't want to be a regulated business.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And, um, it was this like Plymouth duster from the eighties. I don't know if you know the car, but it had a mask. So back in the eighties, cars would have masks out front. And that was kind of the style. Um, and, um, I could tell you could tell by looking at me that I was like this shy kid, very, very nervous, didn't really know what was going on, you know, landed in a new place.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
It's going to just grind the company to a slow death. So find some way to do it via partnerships or something. When we got started, it was unheard of to... to be a financially regulated startup. It was really before the word fintech existed, for example. Robinhood predated that, probably created it to some degree.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And then the press was always telling this David and Goliath tale where we were these little guys that were going after the big, established, gigantic competitors. And we had the millennials on our side. And so it was just very, very positive.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
always and it kind of i was like i don't really get what all of the fuss is about like all of the negative press and all the stuff that people are talking about that's happening to other companies maybe not us eventually i would get like the comms and marketing people that um
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
they would come and show me the clock of like company perception have you seen this i've not no it's like it's like this clock and like basically when you're kind of here everyone loves you and when you're kind of here everyone hates you and and they're like so you're here at like four o'clock but you should get ready in the next six to twelve months you'll be here and and everyone's gonna hate you and you just haven't seen it yet
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah. And then it keeps going around and they were like, look, Facebook is here. They're like a little ahead of you. Everyone hates them. They ended up being exactly right. Six to 12 months later, it was like all negative press. But I guess like the way I got used to it was just going through that. Right. It's like the first time a negative article hits, you're like, holy shit.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
it's negative press. I've never seen it before. You kind of feel like it's the end of the world. And then, you know, after the 600th one, you're just kind of like, okay, that's another one of these things. I'm just going to move on and run my business. And then when the press turns positive, you're like positively surprised and you're not expecting it. So I think that's how I got through it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
You just get punched in the face enough and your face contorts to the shape of the fist, right?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
How have you managed your personal life through all this? Because I feel like, you know, when we started the interview today, you talked so much about your personal life and, you know, how you came to this country and the build. And I feel like, you know, as you're an entrepreneur and your professional and personal life almost become one.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And, you know, when you're building something that's growing as fast as you are, you get absorbed and you have to be like, you know, you sleep and dream and eat. Robinhood, that's how it has to work. That's how it goes. What's been powerful for you in your personal life that you think has allowed you to reinvent, reboot, stay renewed, stay re-enthusiastic?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
You seem as excited about Robinhood today as I imagine you would have been in 2013, if not more. And what's allowed you to renew your enthusiasm so consistently?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
My kind of sort of like analogy of... So many things, my mental model for so many things that I use in business and in life is kind of the barbell. Like I like to get things on opposite sides of the barbell, right? And I tend to ignore the things in the middle, right? So basically for me personally, my work is like highly intellectual and that's maybe on one extreme.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And what's the opposite of intellectual, just sort of like the physical? So I really focus on that. And it's just super basic. And when I started, I would kind of... not really spend too much time and effort on my health, but as I've gotten older and the job's gotten more stressful, I noticed that like effort I put in here pays off multiples, right?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So now my like wellness routine and my training, I spend more time just dialing it in. So making sure I get the right amount of sleep that I have an awesome mattress and That, like, I keep my bed at the right temperature. I like to journal before bed, and I like to shut off the devices. The devices, by the way, has been the hard part for me. You know, I, like, try really hard.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Skyscrapers everywhere. You know, there was just I remember the skyscrapers, you know, just nothing prepares you for that when you're coming from. a very, very small country. It took me a little bit of time to like get reacquainted with my parents.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I have to do unnatural things to, like, stop from looking at my phone.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
My phone's not with me right now, for example, because it's hard to avoid looking at it. And if I know it's in my pocket, then it's almost too close. Yeah. I mean, actually, during the whole GameStop stuff, it was particularly acute for me because I was at home. So there was no boundary between work and personal. And I was going a little bit crazy.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And so I had this thing where I would try to sleep with my phone in a different room. So I'm not always just tempted to check out what... emergency is happening, which ended up being a big problem the morning of GameStop because it took forever for my team to get a hold of me. And then for a while, I slept with three phones next to me, which it really backfired.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
But yeah, my health, I work out a lot. I've gotten into like hot-cold therapy. At first, I was doing cryo, but then I got like a cold plunge at my house and that really helped. And yeah, just like the basics of sleep and diet, I think, has made a world of difference. And just trying to like...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I don't think I've figured out the device thing and sort of like my rhythm of the day perfectly, but that's a, that's a work in progress.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And your marriage, you're married too, right? You mentioned, yeah. What's, how's, how's it been like dealing with all of this? But it sounds like you've been together for quite some time. Like it's.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, I've been married for almost 10 years now. Yeah. Got a bunch of kids, great kids, and they don't really know what I do.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah. Well, she did, but yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
You would think I would just like jump into their arms and it would be like we didn't miss a moment, but there was definitely a little bit of hesitancy and shyness before I kind of warmed up and realized who they were.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Show them Robin Hood, the cartoon, and they'll get it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Oh yeah, they love that cartoon. I think like the credit card they kind of get a little bit because they know they can use it to buy toys. Yeah, my wife is a great compliment to me. She's very patient. She's very empathetic. All the things that I'm not. And so she's just been an amazing partner through all the crises. And she's sort of like... knew me before Robin Hood, right?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I mean, she, she kind of helped come up with the name. So I think, I think she feels like Robin Hood's like one of the children, just kind of like I do.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah. That's beautiful, man. I wanted to, this I'll probably cut and put back in. I was, you mentioned the credit card there. I'm intrigued as to product you created because you saw the traditional versions of them being ineffective. So when you go build a credit card, What's wrong with a traditional credit card that you can get from anywhere else? What are you doing differently?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I think there are a couple of problems with traditional credit cards. One is that basically the rewards are kind of incomprehensible. I think that anytime there's like...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
websites devoted to like exactly how you should kind of like work through your points to optimize the value you get from all the points um like media empires like the points guy were created on the back of this right it's like yeah if if you want to spend 10 hours a week optimizing your points and max maximizing the rewards um I think that's pretty good.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
But we wanted to create something that simplifies all of that. And basically, just by using it for the vast majority of people, you know you get the best rewards. So a simple, clear reward structure that you don't have to be like a PhD to decipher. People building their credit. If you're a student and you are... You don't have a credit history.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Typically, you have to start out with a really crappy card. You have to upgrade your way to a nicer card once you prove that you're worthy. And there's a crappy starter card for people with no credit history and the premium card for...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah. I mean, it makes sense because you would separate so young that it's almost like you maybe haven't even had an opportunity to To even build a relationship at that age.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
folks that have the means we ask can we can we fix that can we actually have a starter card that has the same economics the same rewards the same design uh for as like a highly premium card and then the digital experience you know most cards don't really think through how to take all of the things that technology and fintech has given us and sort of like give them to you in the same package.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And those are things like virtual cards. I don't know if you've been to a restaurant. You probably go to restaurants where you have to give your credit card to lock down the reservation. Imagine you could create a virtual card so that not every restaurant has your actual card number. And if you want to cancel the reservation, you don't have to call the restaurant.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
You could just disappear that virtual card, right? Got it. Or if you want to sign up for a free trial, you can create a virtual card seamlessly. And that can be your free trial card, but you don't have to give them your real phone number. helps maintain people's privacy. And in fact, there are great innovative businesses, privacy.com created with this notion.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
We put all three of these things in one package, one card for everyone, the best rewards in the industry, 3% cashback on all categories, a beautiful physical card, including the solid gold variant, which I have in my wallet, I can show you, and a digital experience that's like world-class.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, I mean, when my dad left, I must have been three.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And we put all these together and it's definitely the best reviewed, most popular product that we've ever rolled out. Even more popular than free trading. So it's been quite amazing. And now it's just like... People want it rolled out faster. That's the one limitation. We had over a million people join the wait list for it within a month of announcement.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
That's what I mean. I can't even remember being three.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And the bet was that if we make the rewards and the product so good, we wouldn't have to spend the typical $500 to acquire a credit card user that the big banks spend. We could get it just organically. And that seems to have proven out. Wow. Now it's just about getting it into everyone's hands while also validating the economics and the underwriting of a new credit model.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, I mean, I have very few memories from before then. It was basically saying bye to my dad at the airport. Maybe my third birthday party, I vaguely remember.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Vlad, it's been fascinating talking to you. You're truly a extremely unique individual in a positive sense. Oh, thank you. It's really brilliant. Maybe some negative too, you know. Brilliant to dive into your mind, honestly. It's been really fascinating for me. We end every episode of On Purpose with a final five. So these questions have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So Vlad Tenev, these are your final five. The first question is, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Be honest. Don't lie to others, but most of all, don't lie to yourself.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Good advice. Question number two, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I think in the context of the company, trusting experts who have done it before is bad advice, generally speaking. I think you have to listen to experts and understand, but I don't think people should blindly trust anything.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Question number three, if we saw one of your evening journal entries, what would we learn about you that we haven't learned today?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I still really love math and I spend a non-trivial amount of times trying to solve basic math problems.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Really?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Oh, wow. That's cool. In your journal? In my journal.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah. You'll see pictures of like triangles and spheres and stuff in there.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
That's cool. Uh, fourth question, how would you define your current purpose?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I think it's, it's to seek truth. I think if I had to find like a personal, I think a lot about like, what are my, what are my personal values? What do I care the most about? And I think my top value is, is truth. Actually, I care about truth. And I mean, in terms of purpose, uh, I really want to understand how the universe works.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Through pictures, maybe.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, the first snowfall. But yeah, it's like three or four memories. And that's basically it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Mathematically or?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Mathematically, physically, yeah. I mean, we can start with that, but of course, psychologically is good too. Oh, cool. Financially, I think we're closest to that one. Yeah. Pretty close to understanding how it works financially.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And how do you define truth? That's a sub-question to that, not the fifth.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I think that's a really good question. How is truth defined? I think that truth is something that multiple observers will simultaneously agree on. Yeah, so if you had multiple independent intelligent observers observing an event with the same information, they should agree on it. And if they agree on it, then you have high confidence if it's true.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Now, of course, if it's something that's fact-based, it's even easier because you can just prove that it's true if it follows from axioms. But probably the more interesting one is if there's some ambiguity.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah. And with the second short story you shared about the financial situation and seeing the inflation in Bulgaria and coming back to that world when you went back, how did someone like that, how did a kid like you, shy, separated from parents, seeing that in Bulgaria, get to Stanford? What does that journey look like? Because I can imagine that that wasn't a simple or easy journey.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, I also find it true.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
But I think you need a notion of verification and also some notion of independence
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, one of my favorite verifications of truth, I feel in my definition, is timelessness. That something being timeless, i.e. it was as true a thousand years ago as it is today.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, like the Lindy effect, right?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Tell me about it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, basically like, I think it was, I read about her from Nassim Taleb.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Okay, yes, yes, yes, yes.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, so basically like... He says a good approximation for how long something's likely to be relevant is how long it's already been relevant. So I think the way he kind of describes it is... The New York Times bestseller list, if a book sort of like hits the bestseller list and is a bestseller for one week, you can basically assume that it's going to be irrelevant in a couple of weeks, right?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
But if, you know, the Holy Bible, people have been reading it for 2,000 years, you have pretty high confidence that it's going to be relevant 2,000 years from now in a way that you wouldn't with what's on the bestseller list now.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Absolutely. Fifth and final question. We ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I think there's too many laws. Yeah, I think deleting laws is the more interesting thing. If there was a law where in order to create a new law, you had to delete at least one existing law, I would feel much better about it. That's a good law. If you think about over-regulation, which I think is a big problem, it's really, really easy for new laws to be created. It's easy for like
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
organizations and the government to get bigger. And that creates all sorts of problems. It's impossible to get high-speed rail in California. We need a force to counteract that. And right now, it's very easy for these things to get bigger and more laws. But periodically, we've got to go in there and slash laws and make things smaller. And there's a lot of pressure against this.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Well said. Vlad, I look forward to many more
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
conversations with you philosophical seeking of the truth psychological uh truly truly wonderful to get to know you today and thank you for being so honest thank you for being so open and vulnerable and uh even though you described yourself as stoic at the start i definitely feel uh you you shared you shared a lot of emotion in what you shared so thank you so much for for doing that i really appreciate it
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Thank you for taking the time. You know, it's been, it's been a lot of fun. You know, I don't usually do, uh, I don't do too many podcasts in general, but this was a unique experience.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah. I'm very grateful. Grateful for your time. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it, you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the key to growth. and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential. If you know you wanna be more and achieve more this year, go check it out right now.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
That doesn't seem like a natural progression.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So when I got to the US, I didn't know how to speak English.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
That's what I was going to ask. Was that your first language?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah. And Bulgarian was my first language. I think it kind of became clear, you know, once my dad went to the US, then my mom tried to teach me English, but, you know, It doesn't really work unless you're kind of talking to kids and doing it on a daily basis. And I was three anyway, so it would have been tough going. So when I first got to the U.S.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
and I went to school in Bulgaria and I never really like... Found a good group of friends in school either. I was kind of a lonely kid. I mean, it was preschool and kindergarten. So I don't have too many memories of it, but I would always switch schools too. Like when I moved in with my grandparents, they obviously lived in a different part of town. So I would go in a different school.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
So I never really liked, I didn't like the idea of school. And I remember kind of dreading having to go in this new country and even more so I didn't speak the language. I remember just like kindergarten was, was really hard. There were all kinds of different types of kids. Um, I couldn't really like navigate my way around.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
I didn't know who was who I couldn't even tell the teacher that I needed to go to the bathroom. So it kind of hold it in all day. And then I remember first grade, um, I have this like one memory from first grade, which was I was in a little reading circle. And, you know, you know, like the kids do these reading circles and you're reading like these basic books.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And I still remember this first grade reading circle. And I was like, man. I can read. And not only can I read, but I'm reading better than all these American kids. So I think that's when I kind of had the realization that maybe I was like intelligent or I identified as a smart person.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And I think my parents did this like really valuable thing in hindsight, which was they kind of like advocated for me. So they never got into like the PTA or school activities or volunteering. They just didn't have time because my dad was in grad school and working. My mom was working as well just to try to supplement. And they were like, you know, Our kid is smart.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
He should be in the accelerated math. Can he skip grades? They were always trying to push the teachers to put me in another grade. And the teachers were like, well, he's small, and he doesn't really have that many friends. We don't really think it's a great idea to have him skip a whole bunch of grades. But they kept pushing.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And eventually, you know, I was given an opportunity to skip a grade and I did like very, very well at school. But I kind of had this fairly early realization that I was smart and kind of good at math and sciences. And then my parents also had this way of like applying pressure on me.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
which I think was like kind of honest from their perspective, but also might've been a little bit strategic, which was we're new to this country. We're immigrants. Like we're not citizens. We could sort of like get kicked out at any time. There was this like fear of deportation always. And so it was kind of like, you got to do well in school because, uh, Otherwise, we might get deported.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
And for sure, you're going to have to get a scholarship because we're not making any money in this family. So you're going to have to like if you want to go to college and make it in this country and get an education, it's kind of on you. I would kind of hear this and really internalize it in an early age. But it was quite intense. I was like, all right, well, I better just like.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
always ace all my exams and and do well because there was like all this pressure of the the family making it in this country that i felt a big part yeah that i felt a big part of did you did it ever feel like too much or it felt like it just got you to perform and you locked in like did you find pressure to be your friend or did you find pressure overwhelming
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Robinhood was a very controversial name, and I think that's what made it powerful because you either love it or you're kind of like repulsed by it to some degree. But it doesn't sound like a finance company. The name itself tells you a lot about what the company stands for and what the products help you achieve. The number one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Yeah, I don't think that it ever felt like too much. I think school felt, school at least kind of in the early days was relatively easy for me. Yeah, I mean, I kind of like sailed through elementary school. By the time I got to middle school, I was probably like, four years ahead of my classmates, three or four years ahead in mathematics, for example. My dad always emphasized mathematics too.