Robinhood’s CEO Responds to the “Gambling” Criticism | Vlad Tenev

Yeah, we get that criticism, and of course you mentioned the switcher and being able to customize it. We get the criticism in both directions, actually. You know, we have people that just don't want to see prediction markets, and for that we have personalization and all the initiatives we have not just for you to disable it, but also to make sure that we show you the content that you want to see in the app when you want to see it. So, it's a big priority not just with prediction markets, but also the more different products and features we have. We have to solve the problem of you just not being aware of us or offering a great feature that you can benefit from. So, yeah, there's both "I don't want to see this product"—prediction markets being a great example—and also, "I want to see it more. Like it's too buried in the product and I don't want it to be, you know, three taps away. I just want to see what's going on right now." And I think personalization is an answer. The other thing we've been experimenting with is in some cases, if really the experience is very, very different, we break it out into a separate app, which is what we did with banking. So, if you want like a banking and a card experience, you can have that in the banking app. If you want a more trading-first experience, you have like the main green Robinhood app. And if you want full crypto, the Robinhood wallet has like a DeFi-native experience.

I mean, I think that making things cohesive and making the purpose of the company and what we stand for more understandable is a fair critique. We hear that a little bit. Everyone always wants features, and it's hard for me, and the Korean stocks, I think they're right. I think we probably should have Korean stocks as well as stocks from every single market. There's just a bunch of stuff that we just haven't gotten to yet because there's always more and more to build. And the way that I think about this is there's kind of three buckets of things, right? Infrastructure improvements that just make the existing experience better, like faster performance, just better, nicer, cleaner UI/UX, reliability so that we just can handle traffic spikes better and things like that. And we made tremendous progress there even in the past year, actually. There's the category of like what's available at other brokers that Robinhood doesn't have. And that's a big category. Up until recently, it's trust accounts. International stocks are available at some of our competitors. You've got things like fixed income, if you want to buy direct bonds, mutual funds. You know, there's a lot of things that we don't offer that are sizable parts of portfolios of customers, right? And then there's this third bucket which I think can be easy to overlook. Not a lot of people have products here, but it's just like, can we innovate and can we be the first to market with new products relative to our peer set at least? And that's where things like prediction markets, Robinhood Ventures—entirely net new product—things like Robinhood Chain and Robinhood Earn. Like we also want to put things in there that are completely unexpected. Agentic trading we're talking about. Nobody big, nobody non-trivial is working on agentic trading besides us, right? Like we're just figuring that out.

I try not to think about it very much. Yeah, and again, it's one of those things where California has this interesting kind of referendum-based structure where if you get enough support, even if the governor or local politicians or the people are opposed to something, you can get on the ballot anyway. We have a prediction market on this.