Tokenization, Agentic Trading, Harmonic: Robinhood's Mission to Expand Ownership with CEO Vlad Tenev

[00:00:00] Prediction markets are an evolution of news. You just can see what's happening and what's likely to happen in the future through the odds. >> What is your reaction to the revolution in math that's happening with AI today? >> It's too centralized, right? It's like AI companies with their big data centers [music] and their employees using secret models to sort of do all this work. >> Do you think people let agents trade for them? >> Agentic trading clearly product market fit. We're seeing really strong adoption like over 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts with us. >> Many of these things that you describe, institutional traders [music] have the ability to do this, but it's expensive and sophisticated. If that's democratized, what does that mean? >> Hi listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today I'm here with Vlad Tenev, the founder and CEO of Robin Hood. We talk about what Robin Hood is [music] today as a financial conglomerate trying to expand ownership in the economy from [00:01:00] tokenization to prediction markets to [music] how AI agents will trade for everyone in retail. We also talk about harmonic his effort to make a math super intelligence [music] and whether there can be distributed discovery and science rather than centralized. Welcome Vlad. Vlad thank you so much for doing this. >> Well, thank you for having me. So everyone knows Robin Hood but has also evolved a ton as a company. Can you just u put in context for our listeners like what do you describe it today? We do a lot of things. Uh we're live in some form or another in over 120 countries. And if I had to sum up Robin Hood in one word or one idea, it would be ownership. I think we're the ownership company, the companies that that's most associated with that. And when I say that um so why does ownership matter um I think on an individual basis people want to own [00:02:00] things it's the tried andrue route to financial freedom financial independence you know if you're if you're an asset owner um and you accumulate assets over time it's just the the the best way to build your wealth So there's a individual element to it that really you know whether you're trading whether you're accumulating assets whether you're investing in venture I think it's is very very important and also you know the things you own say a lot about your personality. It's almost like it becomes like a part of your identity like if it's a car collection or your colle collectibles your your cards your stock portfolio I think there's a lot of individuality into it. So I think there's an individual benefit but I think there's also a collective benefit and in the sense that uh a society without broad ownership is [00:03:03] inherently very unstable. It's a fragile society. And if if you have more people that own things, they're more bought in. They have more more stake in the outcome. And they become kind of defenders and protectors of the system. And so I think especially now when people are kind of pushing back against society and it it feels a little bit fraught with AI and and all of this disruption. I think giving people the ability to own companies at earlier stages is uh is increasingly important. So it's really what ties together all of our things from uh Trump accounts which is ownership at age zero. Robin Hood ventures ownership of private companies before they go public. Tokenization you can think of as ownership gone global like how can we make all the people outside the US people in 120 plus [00:04:04] countries that don't sometimes even have functional banking systems how can we kind of plug them into this economic fabric of society. Um so yeah that that's how I think about it. We started off as just um a simple app to buy stocks at zero commissions on your phone and then we've kind of expanded from that into a increasingly global financial conglomerate that allows customers to own things across a wide variety of surfaces and asset classes. you might be the only large financial I think of as a um as a missionary organization with the other being like Vanguard or something like that. Um uh can we talk about how you got here like you know uh so you I learned recently that you studied math under Terrence Tao and you um worked on HFT. Uh neither of those sound like a missionary for people if if I may say [00:05:06] that. How did you how did you discover this mission or or you know come to come to it? Yeah. >> Yeah. So I mean rewinding back even even further. I was born in Eastern Europe in the late 80s kind of on the brink of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lifting of the Iron Curtain and uh actually in the 1990s. So I immigrated to the US after my my parents my dad had an opportunity to come study at the University of Delaware for his masters and then um was also was able to take advantage of that and and stay in America full-time. And so my mom came about a year after and I came about 6 months um after her which was a a pretty unique experience. I mean, you talk to a lot of parents. Um, I didn't see my dad for a year and a half and my mom for 6 months when I was a small child. I lived with my grandparents and a large portion [00:06:08] of that was we just didn't have the money to send the whole family. So, we we had to, you know, we weren't sure that my dad would have a long-term future in this country. So, we thought maybe he'd come back after a year or 2 years. Uh and anyway, he did quite well and was able to send for my mom and and then me. And my last year in Bulgaria, 1991, the inflation rate was something like 170% in Bulgaria. So my early memories were the rolling blackouts and you know, my my family huddled around the radio, which was battery operated, just listening to what was going on. the lines at the bodega which I could see from my window for buying milk and eggs. The milk would come in these big plastic bags. Um and you know the one week a year you would get bananas from other communist countries. So Cuba would the Cuban bananas I remember were just [00:07:09] amazing. And then I would I would come to the US and there were just bananas everywhere, right? But they weren't as good. Um, and so yeah, and and even after I moved in 1997, Bulgaria had the unfortunate distinction of having the number one inflation rate in the world. It was something like 2,000% annualized. So they were just adding zeros to the currency every couple of months. And so from that point, I just developed kind of a understanding of money. I had to be very independent. You know, my parents, it was always a topic of conversation and we would have to send money to my grandparents back home as they were dealing with this inflation crisis and my grandparents actually would keep their assets in copper cookware. So, there was this closet in my grandfather's house where, you know, he he worked as a doctor kind of in the um in the ship building and and naval industries. So, he was on a boat a lot [00:08:10] of times. So he had his contacts at the port and as soon as he would get salary he would exchange it for copper cookware. So it was kind of the first real world asset that I I encountered people investing in >> stocked like sorry stacked like pans. >> Exactly. In the closet you have >> holds value. Yes. >> Pots and pans. Much better than the local currency at the time. >> And so uh yeah I just I grew up with that. I grew up understanding you know what happens in a broken system uh where you don't have you know free markets and good healthy capital markets and I'd say for me um I pretty quickly discovered that uh academically I I was quite strong um and also independent basically by choice you know my parents couldn't really afford babysitters or after school activities or any of that stuff. They were they were both working multiple jobs and my dad was a full-time [00:09:10] graduate student. So, it was kind of like, you know, when I was in kindergarten, 5 years old, they would I would walk back from school by myself. Uh they would tell me, "Okay, go to the neighbor's house." We lived in apartment buildings at the University of Maryland. Knock on knock on the door. Your neighbor will watch you for, you know, couple of hours. Then they realized, all right, our our son's going through this like complicated ritual to get home. We might as well just give him the key. And >> you know, pretty soon after that, I would let myself in, do my homework, go outside, play with my friends. So, I was I was very independent. >> And uh there was always this like pressure of having to succeed and do well in school. Probably for a couple reasons. One, I was good at it. And so everyone just everyone around me was like do more school, skip grades, like do better in math, more math, you know, and you know the teachers would have these meetings with my parents like hey your your son you know do you know he's [00:10:11] he's really good at math you should you know put him in this thing. So I think that was one of the benefits of growing up around the University of Maryland was very academically oriented community and they would try to sort of like identify the kids that had potential and accelerate them. Um the other thing was my parents would just sit me down and say look the financial status of this family is very insecure. We're not making any money. So, you're going to have to basically get a scholarship if you want to go to college. And to get a scholarship, you are going to have to do very very well in school. And also, by the way, um we might get we're we're like visa holders here. So, you know, if we lose our jobs, we're going to have to get sent back to Bulgaria. So, there was all this pressure to succeed academically. And um you know and and for me you know my math PhD program at some point it became kind of this challenge like what's the hardest thing? [00:11:11] How can I do better at the hardest thing? And it was this almost like competition with myself. Um and and with with my my parents who were also very academically strong like oh what was the hardest subject for you at school dad? Oh chemistry. let me just do really well at chemistry or you know what what was the most advanced math that you did? And I think math has this like ladder of achievement. It's almost like playing a really good video game like you always know what the next hardest thing is and it's almost like how quickly can you go to algebraic geometry or algebraic topology and can can you can you learn that earlier and kind of understand it? And I think what appealed to me when I got to grad school was this idea that if you are if you create a a new mathematical theory, you know, may maybe you'll be remembered for a really long time. And you know, just like kids in school, everyone learns, you know, Gaus [00:12:11] and Remon and all these greats. if you create a theory, maybe kids will be learning and sort of like thinking about your work hundred hundreds of years from now. So that that was kind of what appealed to me. >> Just given that background and you know you should also explain what harmonic is as a as an effort. Um what is your reaction to uh the revolution in math that's happening with AI today? I think I think on the one hand it's very exciting and sort of uh predictable because the rise of AI models and the ability to verify the outputs put together has led to kind of automation of the of the math pipeline. Um and and I think it's really really exciting, right? Um uh I think that the the power and the tools um I mean the math is changing so quickly and you know math as a field hasn't changed very rapidly at [00:13:12] all in thousands of years. I mean when I was in grad school most of the work was still being done in person with like chalk and a chalkboard. It's like there was no collaboration. people weren't even using computers. So now um math has kind of converged with coding. Mathematicians are using the same tools. They're using version control. They're using like lean for for verification and uh and and the field is acceler accelerating very rapidly. um about about a year ago. So, Harmonic, which is a startup that I co-founded a couple years ago with the goal of building mathematical super intelligence. Um so, last year we created uh a model called Aristotle that was one of three that got a gold medal on the International Math Olympiad. And then subsequently to that we rolled it out to the public and uh we had people using Aristotle to tackle [00:14:12] unsolved math problems. And so uh uh it was used to like solve these aridos problems. Uh there was these other there were these other mathematicians that were uh using it for new results and and so forth. And so then I started thinking a lot about okay what's the future of math like what how should these tools be used and [snorts] um I think for for me it was very important for the tools that I build not just harmonic but also Robin Hood to be empowering to individuals to people and so the one thing I don't love about like this latest uh wave of of AI models solving math problems is that it's too centralized, right? It's like AI companies with their big data centers and their employees using secret models to sort of do all this work. And and I [00:15:14] think what what's more attractive and what would ultimately win out in the end as a model is rolling these things out and actually putting them in the hands of people and having having the users make interesting discoveries and and inventions. >> So I um am uh probably like a pretty fundamental believer in decentralization uh as a as a philosophical premise um and I would love to believe that's true. I think that there are uh a lot of people who work at large centralized AI companies who would say like if if I may push back a little bit that this is cope and centaur play will just be outclassed by you know more compute in an agent loop like how do you like do you believe that's that's true or what will be the um human input here that is productive in math >> well I think that um I think it's sort of like two separate things right one is what's the role of the individual [00:16:14] mathematician and uh the other is is this going to be like a product that people use or are the AI labs going to be producing the products? I mean I have thoughts on both of them but on on the second one it's much more interesting. I think that a world where you have the AI labs on a proprietary basis making all the discoveries and you have like the open AI or anthropic data centers that are just running code you know managed by the employees of those companies and you know they're vertically integrating and you know producing all the drugs and selling the drugs to people um making all the mathematical and and physical discoveries and publishing all the papers. If all of that is happening and it's owned by the AI labs themselves, I I think that's a bit of like a dystopian outcome and unlikely to [00:17:15] happen for for a couple of reasons. um not not just like technological and market but I think also like if if that happens to a significant degree people will they'll lose their license to operate right >> um I think it's much more >> I think you could have the same outcome of >> uh Navier Stokes being proven or you know the uh light the partial remon hypothesis or any any one of these things and it'll be much more accepted if it was like a random lay person using >> it might be celebrated. Yeah, >> I I think for sure. Um and I think that's how it's going to happen. That's the likely scenario one year from now. I think you also have the uh the the confounding factor of a lot of the people that are going into these AI labs are former researchers and so they're like excited by doing research and and I [00:18:16] think they're confused as to why this is being poorly received from their perspective. It's like oh I I'm a researcher. I was brought into a research organization to do research and now all these academics are are mad at me. Um, but yeah, I think that, yeah, and I've said this to folks that work at the companies. I think it would have been much better if they found some mathematicians and kind of collaborated with them to not make it seem like, you know, there's this dark data center dystopian future where, you know, one company is going to make all of the scientific discoveries. Can we talk a little bit about um both the you know new ways you want to extend ownership as part of Robin Hood and then also how Robin Hood is intersecting with what's happening in AI. Um maybe we can just uh start with uh what you guys are doing with tokenization or your vision for it. >> Yeah. So tokenization is really it's a it's a new innovation and the idea is almost similar to stable coin. So the way a stable coin works is you take some [00:19:17] dollars or treasuries, put them put put them in a wrapper, put them in a box, and then you mint and burn tokens against the box and the traditional assets stay custodied at a traditional institution like a like a bank and then the tokens can trade freely on DeFi. So they can move anywhere around the world. Uh they can trade in fractional amounts. they can be swapped in different protocols or lending pools. Um, and that opens up just a >> software characteristics. >> Yeah. So, you can kind of extend that concept to any real world asset. So, we've we've uh we've done it with stocks. So, you can put stocks in a box and minute burn tokens against them and they can trade all over the internet on blockchains like software. You can do it with private companies, you know, instead of a stock, it's like a SPV with private company shares. Um, behaves the [00:20:17] same with some slight differences around redeeming and and things things of that nature. You could do it with art, collectibles, real estate. So, um, what we launched and and we've been playing around with tokenization and experimenting with it for many years. So last year we had an event in the south of France where we launched stock tokens which are tokenized versions of US stocks and we did it in Europe but it wasn't fully DeFi enabled. So if you're a European customer using Robin Hood you could trade them and they felt very much like real stocks but you couldn't actually you know send them out on Ethereum or on the blockchain and put them in pools or compose them with with other smart contracts. Now this year we took it one step further. We relaunched stock tokens with fully DeFi enabled characteristics and we launched it in conjunction with Robin Hood chain which is our new blockchain built for real [00:21:17] world assets and Robin Hood chain has become one of the fastest growing I think the fastest growing across a lot of metrics blockchains in history and what we've seen is just an explosion of developer activity. uh I think we announced recently it's the number one chain in developer activity too. Um and you know developers have taken stock tokens which have become kind of like Legos and have started building all sorts of interesting smart contracts NFTTS poolled assets where you'll take for example a memecoin and link it with a stock token and you know this is just sort of month one and month two type activity. Um yeah, I think these financial primitives as the foundation of a developer platform will become really really big. And I think what's more exciting to me than this is uh Robin Hood chain is a way to enable the longtail of countries. So people in [00:22:18] countries that don't have highly functioning capital markets or financial systems like you know places in South America or Africa. Anyone with a smartphone and a non-custodial wallet can now get exposure to US markets at incredibly low cost. So in the same way that I think stable coin became the default way for people in these countries to get access to dollars, stock tokens and products like that will be the default way to get access to US equities um for for for all of these people. >> May they have access to not just copper pots but wealth creation. >> Exactly. and private companies and and really the vision for Robin Hood chain and tokenization is let's just take all the things that work on Robin Hood and put them on chain and make them available to um people in all these countries and I think one one thing I've learned is a lot of people so you know we're new to operating a blockchain we're new to uh operating these you know [00:23:18] onchain smart contract products and a lot of the criticisms that you know Robin is received like we've been called a corpo chain, right? Like the best blockchains are so so they told me they they said the best blockchains are managed by these like organizations and consortiums and everything's decentralized and you know you guys are a corporation managing a chain. How is that going to be as good? Well, um maybe you sacrifice a little bit of like organizational decentralization purity, but what you get is just focused leadership and someone you know or some group of people with very very clear direction pushing things forward. And the other thing is also I think it is good to have Robin Hoodbacked products on the chain too. A lot of chains take the approach of, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom, let the developers just build all this stuff. We love the developers as well, but I think having primitives like stock tokens that [00:24:18] have our backing that people can trust. Um, uh, we've seen that that just creates more interest to to build on them because, you know, to some degree people know, okay, Robin Hood's backing them. They're they're legit. Like, that's a trusted brand. We know they're not going to go away. So um that gives them much more confidence to build than you know if it was just a team of you know two or three engineers somewhere that are offering these primitives. >> Is there um an example of a composition that you think should exist on stock tokens or has already come from the ecosystem that you're excited about? I mean, one of the things that I'm thinking about is um yeah, it's like how how can we take some of these derivative products like options? Can can you make like really nice smart contract native options contracts? You know, there there's been a tremendous amount of innovation in the traditional markets that's to some degree like stymied by [00:25:18] how hard it is to just move off of mainframes onto more modern things and take all the counterparties that are that rely on the system being predictable and slowm moving. Um, so I I think a a big part of it is just let's provide the primitives and let the developers kind of put them together in uh in in in new ways. And I don't want to I don't want to, you know, presuppose what developers come up with because I I wouldn't have been able to tell you that, you know, stock linked stock token linked NFTts or uh stock token meme pairs would would become a thing. Like I just had no way to no way to foresee how quickly those things would grow and become become real. >> It's not necessarily ownership. What is your perspective on prediction markets? Yeah, I mean I actually think prediction markets do tie into ownership because a lot of people have unique knowledge and [00:26:19] ideas and they have hot takes on things that maybe not everyone knows. Like you might be an expert in uh AI model development. You know, we have lots of contracts that allow you to speculate and hedge on what AI model will be best this week or this month or or this year. And the way to kind of like monetize that knowledge before prediction markets was highly indirect like maybe you could >> trade derivatives on you know Google stock or Nvidia stock >> imprecise. Yeah. >> Yeah. And so there is there is an important thing with being able to monetize your your own knowledge and and and doing it more directly. It's actually one of the reasons we announced and and we're planning to launch KPI contracts. So for a long time if you wanted like say you're study let's say you're studying a company and you have a pretty good idea that it's going to beat earnings EPS or revenue. Well, in the [00:27:20] past, if you bought uh the stock or um yeah, you bought like uh an option on the stock, sometimes the stock would beat the company would beat earnings, the stock would go down for some unrelated reason, you know, guidance and one of these things. So, KPI contracts now allow you to actually trade the the EPS print, the revenue print, or any of the other KPIs that that might matter to a company. So um I I think there's that aspect where you can actually monetize your belief. Um you can hedge more precisely. Um for example, there's a will the California billionaire tax pass contract which I think is a useful hedging instrument for some people. Uh uh not me personally. I'm not hedging with it, but one could. Uh the other thing about it is I think it's a new source of of information. I I think of it almost as in in the pure form prediction markets are an evolution of news. So what does news look like in the [00:28:23] future? I don't think it's the New York Times. Uh but I think it could be something like it where you have your front page, your business section, lifestyle, culture, sports, uh and sports is a big part of it. Um and and you just can see what's happening and what's likely to happen in the future through the odds. So a lot of people don't even trade these things. They just like to open the app and just check out. >> That's me. >> What's going to happen? Yeah. >> Do you think people let agents trade for them and when and what's the impact of that? >> Yeah. So, we launched a product earlier this year um which is basically a Robin Hood MCP. We call it Agentic trading and we we have Agentic credit card as well. So, in in the broader realm of Agentic Finance, I think there's two things that have product market fit. One is agentic trading very clearly like having an agent execute your trades and and do a strategy for you. And we're seeing really strong adoption like over 150,000 [00:29:23] uh customers have opened aic trading accounts with us in in the few months since we've launched it. >> Wow. And uh if if you look at the tool calls, you know, the the tool calls have just been following this smooth exponential where the last number we announced was something like 30 million to tool calls per day. Um so Aentic trading clearly product market fit. Uh, and you know, we started by just having an MCP and a couple weeks ago at our Hood Summit event, we announced Robin Hood agents, which is basically taking it one step further and the harness and the entire UI is now inside a Robin Hood account. So, you can you can kind of think of it as if if you're a Claude Code or a Codeex user, uh, it's almost like a a tool like that that's optimized for trading. So you can run loops and say okay every day you know execute a run of my strategy, rebalance my [00:30:23] portfolio, look at opportunities. Um we have skills so uh you you can you know do like a portfolio rebalance or all sorts of other things. Uh we have agent apps. So we launched an app store where you can for example connect to a source of satellite data and if you want to create a strategy that like counts cars and parking lots of retailers or you know something of that nature we'll we'll make that available and and the way that I think that'll evolve is we're we're going to look at all the capabilities that the coding harnesses have and see how we can provide really nice clean trader native versions of that that just make it really really easy to to be an active trader. >> Amazing. Uh do you what do you think the impact is of this on either um you know participant mix or financial infrastructure just because many of these things that you describe institutional traders have the ability to do this but it's expensive and [00:31:24] sophisticated right and so if that's democratized what does that mean? >> Well that's really the north star of the product. It's can we put the capabilities of a hedge fund or a sophisticated algorithmic trading firm into the pockets of normal individuals. So in the same way that you know if you were a sophisticated you know grad student in computer science or something you could uh write a trading strategy and if you went through even more effort you could deploy it you could get you know rack space in the data center connected to the exchanges um can we just sort of like streamline all aspects of that so that you know in the same way that it's made it easier for anyone to be a software engineer here. Robin Hood agents and our MCP can make it easier for more people to be quant traders. And I think the outcome of that is there will just be more trading activity. Um I [00:32:24] think at first it'll be concentrated in a relatively small group of sophisticated people, but their trading activity will likely increase quite substantially and then over time it'll just filter to more and more of the population. Yeah, I I think coding is a good analogy. It's like um there's lots of people that want to there's people that code and for them you know they were first to adopt the coding agents and their output multiplied but then now there's people that just wouldn't have picked up uh you know VS code or cursor before but someone showed them how to use claude or codeex and now they can build a website just really easily. So it'll it'll lift I think it'll lift the tide across the across the board. I believe the desire to make software or automate things is much broader than I did uh perhaps before any of the coding and agentic coding encoding AI and agentic coding happened. But wanting to make money off of a belief feels like a much more universal thing. [00:33:24] >> Yeah. And I think that you know as people get um as it becomes easier as you can really e a lot of people have ideas right and if you can take that idea and turn it into a strategy with as little friction as possible >> uh if we can get it to approach the friction of just buying a single stock then I think a lot more people will will do it. There may not be an answer to this question, but is there an obvious way in which um financial infrastructure or risk management needs to change in reaction to this? >> I don't think so. Um so I'll tell you the safeguards we have on day one. So right now you have to create a new separate account which is segregated from your main Robin Hood balance. So you can create an MCP account, you can create an Aentic account, you have to move money in there. Um and then you know for customers that choose to have trade approvals uh by default you have to approve your trades but then you can [00:34:24] turn it off so that you could you permissions. Exactly. Well actually it's it's not as dangerous as that because it's not like it can go into your other accounts and >> it's not money for you. So it's it's uh sandboxed. It's a sandboxed uh maybe not quite airgapped but but pretty close. And we built a lot of the we refine a lot of the infrastructure for the sandboxing and the harness in-house at Robin Hood. Yeah. So far I think that it's not just a huge percentage of the market. The reason I don't think I I don't see any clear massive overhauls necessary is that highfrequency trading has been a thing for a really long time. I mean markets went fully electronic uh about 20 years ago and so um you know everything from the exchanges to a lot of the brokers have sort of conformed to this new reality of most of the workflows being [00:35:24] algorithmic trading that happens in data centers in New Jersey rather than what a lot of people still think happens which is have paper tickets floor traders and in a trading pit. So I I don't think it's it's not clear to me that anything fundamental has to change with regulation. Um but you know as as it gets bigger and which I don't doubt it will we might run into special cases for which we we need more regulatory clarity or >> yeah I was more from an infrastructure perspective um if you just use coding as a proxy uh I did not maybe we all should have but I think it was not obvious that CI/CD was going to completely fall over like in the face of >> um u orders of magnitude growth. in code generation. >> Oh yeah. >> And so that that was my question which is like yes of course we've had HFT but if like everybody is a high frequency trader that feels like new load. [00:36:24] >> Yeah. I mean there's a couple of different layers in the stack right and we we should expect our onchain stack is slightly different that already has MCPs um but you have our onchain tools um which a lot of it is. You know, I talked about Robin Hood chain being the best chain for real world assets. Also, it's the best chain for AI agents. So, we're seeing a lot of agentic trading there on our um CFI centralized offerings. Um you know, we we we have a lot of endto-end control over the entire system, right? We we have our databases, we have uh our code that the strategies are running on the sandboxes. We build a lot of those tools. We have to optimize all of that. But you know once it gets through our system you get to places like uh the algo the market makers which are all extremely sophisticated software shops. I mean you're talking you know [00:37:24] Citadel, Jane Street, Jump Trading. These are like lat low latency high frequency folks. So I'm not so worried about them scaling to meet the demand. And then and then you have the exchanges and the exchanges because of pressure from HFTs and algo trading have really optimized their APIs to to handle huge volumes. But that said, I think that we're still we're still at a low percentage of the total trading is aic. So um I think we'll have some warning. I mean, we'll see it increasing and I I don't think that, you know, we're we're going to be at the point, you know, imminently where agentic mediated trades are, you know, a double-digit percentage of of the activity. I think we'll have some time. >> Given you're such a strong believer in ownership and then democratized ownership as important to societal stability um and also like just [00:38:24] opportunity for people. I think there's a sense that the AI revolution is not a broadlyowned thing. Do you have an idea of, you know, what the solutions here might be? And maybe you can talk about Trump accounts as well here. >> Yeah. Um, and and I think we identified this problem last year. >> You know, it it's a couple of things, right? First, all of the major innovative AI companies are private. I mean, with some exceptions. You can look at Nvidia and and uh and Google, but you know Yeah. But those companies were already quite big before they really got into this new phase of of AI. So if you wanted to invest in a large language model uh a couple years ago and you wanted exposure to open AI or anthropic uh you're basically out of luck as a as an individual investor. Um and and I think there's a lot of reasons for that. One is private markets have gotten it's it's gotten really easy for high growth [00:39:24] successful companies to raise money in the private markets. You know, they're basically have >> at massive scale. Yes. >> Massive scale. And that didn't used to be the case. You know, back in the 80s, a company like Microsoft, uh even in the '9s with Amazon, you know, they went public at valuations in the hundreds of millions. So, individual investors that got in during the public offering could make a,000x. Now, if you have uh an AI lab that goes public at a trillion or two trillion, in order for an individual investor at IPO to make that type of return, they'd have to get into the quadrillions, right? It's crazy. I I think it's unlikely basically. Maybe it could happen, but I think it's going to be much tougher. And instead, you know, the the gains keep getting concentrated into a smaller and smaller group of venture capitalists or institutional investors. Um, and you know, then we're wondering, well, why are people upset about data centers? Well, I mean, if you [00:40:25] think about it, if I'm an individual, I don't benefit economically from any of this activity. In fact, you could say, well, it's threatening my livelihood, my job, it's polluting my neighborhood. They're making all this noise. Um, and yet juxtapose AI with something like crypto. Uh crypto has not been it's not like everyone trading crypto makes money, you know, and right now Bitcoin is uh what is it? 85,000. If you bought at 120,000 a couple of months ago, you're down. Um 2022 and 2023 were rough for the crypto industry to say the least. uh a lot of people lost money in those years, but yet in 2024 they came out in full force and um swung the election, I think, in a meaningful way. And if there's even a hint of regulatory overreach for crypto, you have this army of people that are just blasting social [00:41:26] media and, you know, messaging their their congressman and uh or woman and just fighting every every inch of it. And I think a big part of it is crypto is distributed broad ownership by individuals from the beginning and it's almost institutions are coming in late. Um whereas AI is is the difference. So uh what do we do about it? Well, we launched two things. We believe that everyone should be able to invest in private companies and I can't convince companies to go public earlier too effectively. Even though neither can I even though I try doing that sometimes. Like we do have our IPO. I mean, we're an underwriter. We're active in that pipeline, but uh individual investors should benefit from private companies and be a huge shareholder. That that's really the the vision behind Robin Hood Ventures. How can we make it so that it's an anomaly to not have individual retail investors as a big constituent of your seed and series A cap table? So, they should get [00:42:28] they should actually be at the earliest possible stage. And so Robin Hood Ventures Fund One, we actually have an innovative structure for this. You can kind of think of it as a publicly traded venture capital firm. And so what we did was we used our IPO channel, which were the largest retail channel for IPOs. And we used that to raise capital in an IPO from Robin Hood customers, individual retail, and then we use that to invest in startups. And then the the funds are publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. So they trade just like a stock. And so Robin Hood Ventures fund one was latestage privates. Open AI is in that fund. You have uh you have a couple of other companies. Finex a lot of AI companies 11 Labs. um Cruso uh we recently announced um uh so that was ultra late stage and then we asked ourselves well how can we actually go to the extreme and give people exposure to [00:43:29] seed and series A and that's uh that's where Robin Hood ventures fund 2 the idea came to partner with YC and uh use a structure to give people uh exposure to the earliest possible stage where the risk is highest but opportunity is is also greatest and that's the fund that Rich Aberman is uh is running for us and then we have tokenization of privates which solves that problem in a different way but right now for outside of the US and the north star is can we get a private company to be real time tradable 24/7 in fractional quantities just like a stock or a crypto can you you should be able to just trade anthropic 24/7 in low dollar amounts um with like some degree of high quality ownership at least as good as you know owning LP interest in an SPV right um and and that should be available to everyone so that [00:44:30] requires pushing on a bunch of things in the US accredited investor rules being one of them but uh yeah we're we're highly motivated to lead that and and make that happen >> that was my question for you which is um um you know if you are for example a venture capitalists with a portfolio you think is going to make money in privates. Um then you know some people will have a choice of LPS there's institutions there's your friends you can make money for um obviously there are rules around you know QP and accreditation around taking retail interest your view is clearly like some of those rules need to be updated >> yeah you know and there's there was an initiative by the SEC um it was announced last week to uh allow a separate path so they directed FINRA which is the uh primary broker dealer or regulator to create a an exam, an accreditation exam where um you know you can go as an individual and get accredited by you know taking a 2-hour [00:45:30] exam at a testing facility you know and and I think >> versus it being asset based >> versus it being asset based or there's also you know you can be affiliated you could have a series 7 which is an affiliation with a financial firm uh lensure but yeah so it's a knowledge based exam um and I think it's definitely a positive step. I think they're doing stuff, but yeah, I think the the goal would be to make it lower friction because how many people are going to go and sit for an exam uh at a testing facility? So, I I think more work needs to be done and we're we're going to be at the forefront of continuing to push for that. >> I think the main argument against such, you know, evolution of rules would be some sense of like, you know, protection against fraud and paternalism there. What how do you think about that >> for our customers? You know, I we we spend a lot of time talking to them, figuring out what they care about. And one of the things they care about most that they agree with is uh the statement [00:46:31] that I should be in charge of of my money and nobody should tell me how to spend or invest my money. When we say to our customers, do you agree with this? I mean, just overwhelming agreement. Um, so not to say that they'll personally want to do every type of risky speculative investment, but they don't think that it's the government's place or anyone's place to tell them what to do with their money broadly. Now, of course, I think that people should be absolutely clear on what these products are, and so we should make sure to uh tell you what it is, give you as much information as possible. But, you know, I I think about this. Am I going to tell you not to invest in the hot IPO? IPOs are risky for sure. Um, uh, meme coins, even memecoins have like perfect regulatory clarity. If you want to buy a memecoin, you are free to do so. And the SEC even wrote a letter saying these are [00:47:31] not securities, they're collectibles. You know, it's uh, clear the clear the way. Um, so I think I think it's silly to from from a couple of different angles, not not the least of which is, you know, memecoins are completely [snorts] fine in any amount, but private companies. >> It's not rational from a just like pure risk orientation to uh restrict private companies. >> Yeah, I I think I think that's right. And and people are smart, right? I think that um I mean there there should be some sensible regulation. I'm I'm in favor of of that. But I think that um we've just gone too far and the the conditions that made the accredited investor rule necessary no longer hold. I mean, these rules are from a time before the internet. You couldn't even get any information. Um and now there's just an influx of information about everything, particularly private companies and AI models that can just scour and synthesize it for you. So [00:48:32] yeah, I think it it makes a little bit less sense now. >> Can you talk about what Robin Hood is doing to support Trump accounts? >> Yeah. So this uh this was like our way of serving our country, which we're very proud of. Um so Robin Hood was uh selected as the sole initial trustee and broker for the Trump accounts and we're working with BNY, which is America's oldest and most storied bank and and with Treasury and IRS to make this program happen. And yeah, the idea behind it is can we get every child from birth to own a chunk of the US economy through the S&P 500 through a lowcost diversified uh ETF. And uh for every newborn child, so everyone born in January 2025 onward for the next three years, uh they get $1,000 seated by Treasury. and Michael and Susan Dell through their foundation added another over 6 billion to children [00:49:35] in lower income zip codes and a bunch of other people are following like Gwyn Shotwell uh uh committed a donation in SpaceX shares. Brad Gersonner who is the brains and the architect behind the program. he, you know, pushed it forward and also uh made a a really big donation to the the citizens of Indiana and and their children. And um so we're kind of powering the infrastructure, building the app. Um and you know, we love it because I think it's the I think it's the best thing for actually getting household stock ownership from 65% to 95%. And so, uh, when it's successful, I think it'll lead to, uh, a much more stable and prosperous society in in many decades. Our our goal is to make this like the, um, the the best product the [00:50:35] government's ever launched and the most enduring positive uh, aspect of of uh, President Trump's legacy. That's our goal. >> It's an amazing effort. Sign your kids up. Um, so last question for you. Uh Andrew Reid, who we both know well, described you as um a strange combination of like unlimited IQ and the steadiest possible hand when working with, you know, the vagaries of the financial markets and PR and large user bases. >> Um >> how do you keep your levelheadedness or cool or what advice do you have for the many business leaders that listen? I think going through a lot of challenges um as a child just made me very used to going through challenges, right? Um and you know, I had a uh I had a very supportive and uh amazing family, great parents, but we [00:51:35] were kind of uh in this together, right? We kind of all immigrated to the US at the same time and I wasn't like a child that was given things, right? It was almost like you're a member of this family and we all kind of have to figure this out. You I had my part, they had their parts. Um, so it was, you know, obviously they're a child but kind of treated with a lot of autonomy almost as an equal from a very young age. And you know, we run through a lot of we we come across a lot of business challenges at Robin Hood, at Harmonic, at all these things. But, you know, when you step back and say, "All right, well, does it compare to the threat of deportation? What about you know, and we talk about inflation here of 5% and freak out about it? What about the 2,000% inflation that, you know, we went through as as children?" Um, so you know, sometimes I think about that with my own kids, right? >> Do you create challenge for them? [00:52:35] >> We try. I mean, I try to construct challenge, but you have to construct it, right? It's it's a little bit harder. And they they get a lot of positives like they could have tutors. They could, you know, go to all kinds of museums that I didn't have. Uh, >> they have safety. >> Yeah. But but they have safety. And um you know I think there's something very important about having to like struggle and endure. I try to like uh create that environment as much as possible but I think I haven't figured it out. So uh I think I think that's a big part of it. And also probably as we were talking before um it's a good bit of like nature versus nurture. Maybe I was just born like that. And I don't know how much of it's the environment either. I think if we take it away for advice for other leaders, it is just the uh optimistic take that whatever challenge you're going through will make you more level in the future. >> I think Bezos said this, right? The best approach to all of these challenges, it's just grow thick skin. You can [00:53:35] control that about yourself, but you can't control the outside world. So, if you can actually do that, I think it it seems to be a big superpower that not everyone is capable of. >> Awesome. Thanks so much, Vlad. This is great. >> Thanks for having me. Find us on [music] Twitter at no prior pod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you want to see our faces. 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