Vladimir Tenev HOOD

Co-Founder, President, Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of the Board, Robinhood Markets

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev Says It Took Rivals 10 to 15 Years to Catch up to Him (Part 2)

📅 Oct 15, 2026 djvlad 8 MIN 860 VIEWS 57 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS

Become a VladStocks Member now: https://www.youtube.com/vladtv/join Part 1: • Vlad Tenev Dropped Out of PhD Program & La... -------- Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev sits down with DJ Vlad to explain how the fintech app reshaped stock investing after he and Baiju Bhatt moved on from Kronos and launched Robinhood in California in 2013. Tenev breaks down the logic behind commission-free trading, why E-Trade and legacy brokerages were slow to change, and how electronic markets made trades cost a fraction of a penny to process. He also discusses Silicon Valley influences like Instagram, Uber, Facebo...

What Vladimir Tenev said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Vladimir Tenev discussed how shutting down Chronos led to his time at Robinhood. He explained the company's original commission-free trading model, comparing it to early E*TRADE pricing of $20 per trade. Tenev detailed how Robinhood operated at a loss initially, with trades costing less than a penny each. He credited mobile platforms like Instagram, Uber, and Facebook as inspiration for prioritizing user growth over monetization. Tenev noted that incumbents like E*TRADE could have countered with free trades but were hampered by legacy cost structures. He highlighted Robinhood's innovations, including being the first cloud-based broker on AWS, and instant onboarding that enabled trading within 5 minutes. Tenev emphasized that competitors took 10 to 15 years to match the user experience, and he advocated for algorithmic account reviews over manual ones.

Key takeaways

Competitors took 10 to 15 years to match Robinhood's instant onboarding experience.
Trade processing costs were less than a penny per trade for Robinhood.
Robinhood was the first broker to operate on the cloud using Amazon Web Services.
Robinhood enabled zero to trading in under 5 minutes with courtesy access to funds.

Numbers and commitments

Figure	What it refers to	Type	At
$20	E*TRADE trade price in the 1990s	price	1:18
5 minutes	time to open account and start trading	metric	7:52
10 to 15 years	time for competitors to match Robinhood's experience	timeline	7:52

Chapters

0:00Shutting down Chronos
0:37Origin of commission-free trading
0:59Comparison with E*TRADE
1:46Inspiration from tech companies
3:19Trade processing costs
5:41Cloud-based broker innovation
6:11Instant onboarding feature
7:52Competitors catching up

Questions asked in this interview

0:04Did you sell it or just shut it down?
0:12Do I buy a bunch of stuff, or do I actually invest it?
3:19How much did it cost per trade for you guys?

DJ Vlad 0:04 ↗

Okay, so you end up shutting down Chronos. Did you sell it or just shut it down?

Vladimir Tenev 0:09 ↗

We basically just shut it down.

DJ Vlad 0:12 ↗

And then, and I remember right around that time, 2011, that's when I started investing in stocks. Because VladTV was launching, money was finally starting to come in, and I'm like, okay, what do I do with all this money? Do I gamble it? Do I buy a bunch of stuff, or do I actually invest it? And that's when I first started reading Warren Buffett's books and so forth, and that changed my whole life. Like, stock investing completely transformed my life.

Vladimir Tenev 0:36 ↗

Yeah.

DJ Vlad 0:37 ↗

On every level. I would not be where I am right now if I was just relying on making money for my company and spending it. So I'm investing in stocks about this time. So then by 2013, you and Vlad came up with the idea of Robinhood, and you guys are living in California at this point.

Vladimir Tenev 0:53 ↗

That's right.

DJ Vlad 0:54 ↗

Okay, and the whole thing about Robinhood is its commission-free trading.

Vladimir Tenev 0:59 ↗

Yeah.

DJ Vlad 0:59 ↗

Now, I remember when E*TRADE became a thing. That was a big deal.

Vladimir Tenev 1:04 ↗

Yeah.

DJ Vlad 1:04 ↗

But that was like in the '90s, I think.

Vladimir Tenev 1:06 ↗

That's right, yeah.

DJ Vlad 1:07 ↗

Yeah, where it was like, okay, instead of having to have an account and having a financial advisor and calling it in and so forth, you could actually go online and you could do like $7 trades or something like that.

Vladimir Tenev 1:18 ↗

I think back then it was probably $20.

DJ Vlad 1:21 ↗

Which was still way cheaper, because I think that the financial advisors were charging like $50.

Vladimir Tenev 1:26 ↗

Yeah.

DJ Vlad 1:26 ↗

So that was a big deal, and you could do it by yourself. But you said, let's take it one step further and do free trades.

Vladimir Tenev 1:34 ↗

Yeah.

DJ Vlad 1:36 ↗

But the trades themselves actually cost you money.

Vladimir Tenev 1:39 ↗

Right.

DJ Vlad 1:39 ↗

So you guys are operating at a loss initially.

Vladimir Tenev 1:42 ↗

Yeah, for sure.

DJ Vlad 1:43 ↗

What was the overall idea?

Vladimir Tenev 1:46 ↗

Yeah, our observation at the time was, and this is very simplistic, but we kind of had one leg both in New York with the electronic trading thing, and San Francisco, where we saw these services taking advantage of mobile as a new platform, being able to grow very, very quickly. So, Instagram at that time was still in Palo Alto, a very small company, had recently launched, gone to tens of millions of users very, very quickly. They weren't charging anything. They weren't making any money. Uber had recently launched black car in San Francisco. Again, burning money for the first 10 years, right? They did charge for calling a car, but it was very cost competitive to other options, to other black cars.

So, and then of course you had the 800-lb gorilla, Facebook. For the longest time, the story of Facebook was, well, are they ever going to make money? They launch as a site for college kids, college kids don't have any money, they expand, they get to a billion users, and then it was always this story of, okay, well, we get the users and the monetization will come. And then Snapchat, I think, replayed the same playbook. So, the bet that we were making was, well, why couldn't this work in financial services? Let's run a lean technology shop. The trades do cost money to process, but...

DJ Vlad 3:19 ↗

So, how much back then? How much did it cost per trade for you guys?

Vladimir Tenev 3:22 ↗

I mean, it was like, all in, if you take all the systems and everything around it, probably still way less than a penny per trade.

DJ Vlad 3:35 ↗

Oh, so it's super cheap.

Vladimir Tenev 3:36 ↗

Yeah, so it didn't cost very much.

28 more exchanges in this transcript

Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX

APA

Tenev, V. (2026, October 15). Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev Says It Took Rivals 10 to 15 Years to Catch up to Him (Part 2) [Interview transcript]. djvlad. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3067850/

MLA

Vladimir Tenev. "Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev Says It Took Rivals 10 to 15 Years to Catch up to Him (Part 2)." djvlad, 15 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3067850/.

BibTeX

@misc{tenev2026_3067850,
  author       = {Vladimir Tenev},
  title        = {Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev Says It Took Rivals 10 to 15 Years to Catch up to Him (Part 2)},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, djvlad. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {oct},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3067850/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}

▶

Key Quotes (2)

“Our observation at the time was, and this is a very simplistic, but we kind of had one leg both in New York with the electronic trading thing, and San Francisco, where we saw these services taking advantage of mobile as a new platform, being able to grow very, very quickly. So, Instagram at that time was still in Palo Alto, very small company, had recently launched, gone to tens of millions of use”

▶ 1:46 POLICY

“I think they could have done it. It would have been difficult because their businesses were created at a time when trades were more expensive, and so they had to build everything around that with that new cost structure. And they had marketing. They had physical operations. So we had the benefit of starting from scratch. So we could redesign the whole system to be low cost and efficient. I mean I'”

▶ 5:01 POLICY

Mentioned in this interview

E*TRADE: Inefficient and greedy for charging $20 per trade historically.

Instagram None-Instagram: Grew to tens of millions of users without charging money.

Uber UBER: Burned money for first 10 years but grew rapidly in San Francisco.

Facebook: Example of monetization coming after user growth.

Snapchat: Replayed Facebook's playbook of growth before monetization.

Amazon Web Services: First broker on AWS; counterparties doubted Amazon's security.

Warren Buffett Chairman Emeritus: Mentioned by DJ Vlad as influence for investing, not by Tenev.

Earlier, on the same topics

“Robin Hood agents is really about helping people create strategies. And so we rolled out three things, right? One is Robin Hood agents, which you can think of as, you know, we rolled out an MCP a couple of months ago, a model context protocol, which you can think of as an API that lets you connect e”

Sep 30, 2026 at 1:39:10 →

“I think that if you build good systems that are safe and reliable and your foundation is good uh you can move very very fast but I think it requires a continual investment in having the best technology and infrastructure and one thing that I think distinguishes Robin Hood is we're a technology compa”

Oct 31, 2024 at 3:26 →

“There was a perfect storm of three things: the mobile revolution, commission-free trading, and post-financial-crisis disillusionment — lowering commissions to zero was very disruptive and opened the door for a new brand like Robin Hood.”

commission-free trading · Feb 03, 2026 at 8:41 →

“We've certainly been continuing to hire software engineers. Perhaps not at the definitely not at the rate we were hiring in 2021, but one of the reasons we've been able to deliver this high product velocity and keep costs relatively flat is because of the productivity improvements we've seen with AI”

Feb 11, 2026 at 2:34:41 →

Every Vladimir Tenev interview →

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Also at Robinhood Markets

Baiju BhattFounder & CEO, Cowboy Space Corporation; Co-founder, Robinhood
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All Robinhood Markets, Inc. executives →

About Vladimir Tenev

Vladimir Tenev, co-founder, president, CEO, and chairman of Robinhood Markets, has been active in a series of media appearances and company events over the past two months. In a multi-part interview with DJ Vlad, he discussed Robinhood's history, including its early fundraising through AngelList at a $10 million valuation cap, the company's growth to a $5.6 billion valuation in 2018, and his personal transition to billionaire status in 2020. He also recounted the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, describing a $3 billion collateral demand from regulators that he called "the closest we've come to death," and acknowledged that the company's communication during that period was a misstep. At the HOOD Summit '26 in Houston, Tenev announced new product offerings, including AI-driven trading agents and agent apps that allow users to plug in data sources like satellite imagery. He stated that these tools aim to give individual traders access to hedge fund-like capabilities, including 24/7 trading and autonomous "agent loops." He also discussed Robinhood Chain, a blockchain launched two months prior, which he said has seen over $1 billion in daily perpetual and DEX volume, and expressed optimism about tokenization as a means to provide global access to U.S. financial assets. In other interviews, Tenev defended the company against criticism that it encourages gambling, citing personalization features, and discussed the potential for AI agents to generate a large portion of future trading volume. He also mentioned policy initiatives to lower the accreditation bar for private company investing and described a new "Trump account" product that extends ownership to newborns.

All Vladimir Tenev appearances → djvlad on YouTube →