All right, guys. Welcome back to the Full Send podcast. We have Vlad, the founder of Robinhood. Very, very interesting episode. Before we get into it, you guys know the deal. The big game is this Sunday. I am absolutely nuking a PrizePicks lineup this weekend. I don't know exactly what it is. I'm still crafting it. Follow me on PrizePicks. It'll be up there soon. I'm still making some last minute decisions. If you guys have any good tips or pick ideas, DM me on Instagram, too, because I'm going to be shuffling up my picks soon. But I'm taking the Patriots to win because on PrizePicks, if you guys didn't know, obviously you can do your player lineup, but you can also choose who's going to win the big game. Absolute game changer for the app. Also, there's a max discount you guys need to be aware of. Drake Maye, he only needs one passing yard. Add that into your lineup. It's just going to boost your entire pick. Also, if you guys have never tried out the PrizePicks app for some reason, use code Neelk. Plug that in when you download the app and put in just $5 and you're going to get $50 for free. Take advantage of code Neelk. I am so fired up for this Sunday. This is like PrizePicks heaven. Download the PrizePicks app. It's available in so many different states including California and Texas. I'm going to be watching the game at the PrizePicks headquarters. It's going to be electric. Let's get into the pod.
I like that one, too, but I just I don't want to get a John Mayer or like a watch named John Mayer, you know?
I know a little bit. I don't have...
You seen a ceramic skeleton?
I don't get paid quite enough yet to get that, but hopefully in a year or two when these guys...
Well, Stein Steiny's worn Timepiece Trading hat and shirt on the last three.
What do you have there? Is that also a residential? Oh, thanks to me.
So, you're a big watch guy.
I wouldn't say big. I got into it recently. I like the mechanics and the engineering of it, you know. So, I started just like getting complicated complications. Yeah. So, sort of got into it through that.
What's that piece you got there?
Yeah, that's nice. It's the most complicated Rolex ever made. So, it's like a big thick complicated guy. Not to talk about other podcasts, but the Acquired podcast.
Have you heard the Rolex one?
No, I have that one saved. I'm in the middle of the Google one right now.
Yeah. That's a good one, too.
That's a really good one.
But yeah, basically like Rolex hasn't made a new watch in like 75 years. This is kind of the first one.
Wow. A new fundamental mechanism. So, this is a... it's a big... I think the Sky-Dweller is like a relatively big deal because they just like... they're a company that... it's like a Porsche 911, right? Once you get the basic design, you just kind of like make small tweaks. So...
So, how are you the first one to have that?
No. No. I got this retail. Yeah. One of the last to have it.
Well, we all got to roll these on, right?
What are you... John's got... Yeah. I got to get my steps.
We got the president of Happy Eye with us for this one, John. We had to sub Salem out. And we also got Vlad, the CEO, co-founder of Robinhood, the biggest platform in the world in your space, right?
Thank you guys. Yeah, glad to be here.
Harmonic too. We want to talk about that, too.
Do we know how many users Robinhood currently has?
About 27 million. Yeah. 27 million accounts, mostly in the US but large and increasingly growing international presence too.
I'm really interested. I just... it would be sick to take it back and just kind of get your story of how you started. How did you get into launching the app Robinhood?
It was a bit of a meandering path. You know, when I grew up, I didn't really know about entrepreneurship. So, I came to the West Coast to go to Stanford. And Stanford is, as you guys probably know, is sort of an epicenter of entrepreneurial activity. I mean you not only have the school but you have the venture capital industry. You have a bunch of big companies like Google and Meta now. But like a long history. So I came to Stanford to study physics and switched to math. So I was sort of like outside the typical entrepreneurial lane. You know, I didn't go there with the intent of being an entrepreneur, but you're exposed to it for sure and I think that planted a little bit of understanding. So, actually when I graduated Stanford, I went to UCLA to pursue a math PhD. And my career goal at that time or my perception of what I would be would be a math professor. I thought I would be, you know, one of those guys sitting in an office with a couch and a chalkboard thinking and coming up with new math proofs. And my first month in grad school, Lehman Brothers went under. So, you had the start of the global financial crisis. And my co-founder and best friend from college, who had gotten a job, he was also a math and physics guy, so we met through that. He had gotten a job at an algorithmic trading firm. Basically you can think of it as a hedge fund that trades its own partners' money. So no customers. But he had gotten a job at an algorithmic trading firm up in Marin County just north of San Francisco. His first month on the job, my first month in grad school, Lehman Brothers went under, the start of the global financial crisis. So he calls me up and he said, 'Hey, you know, this might sound like a crazy idea. If you ask your parents whether the global financial crisis would be a great time to start a financial company, they would probably think that it was a terrible idea, but I think we should do it.' And I thought about it a little bit and I said, 'Why the hell not? Let's go. Let's... this is new. I'm young. Let's try this thing.' And one thing led to another. So Robinhood wasn't the first idea we had. It was actually the third. We had a couple that were relatively fast failures, but you know, it's like an animal that I really appreciate is the hedgehog, right? The hedgehog just like finds a spot on the ground and it just keeps digging and digging and digging and eventually you get this like big elaborate underground structure. And I think that's what ended up happening with Robinhood. We sort of like started understanding the financial problem and then you get deeper and deeper and deeper and you can kind of draw a straight line to where we are today.
Would you say part of the problem that you also solved at the time was most banks and most brokerages, their mobile presence was very like bad. And I remember once when, you know, we have a mutual friend Ron Roofing and he was telling me about Robinhood and I was like, 'Well, what's the difference?' You know, I think at the time I was trading on E-Trade and he liked it way easier, way simpler. You know, this new generation is going to understand how to use this. And I remember when I downloaded Robinhood, I was like, 'Wait, that's it.' So, I think that's a big problem that you had solved back then. Now everyone's trying to duplicate it. You know, you see like...
Well, also and at the time, I don't know when you started, but up until relatively recently, E-Trade was charging you $7.95 a trade. And I remember he told me that and I said, 'How's that possible? How do you not pay for a trade?' He said, 'No, there's no fees. Trust me. Go buy something and you're not going to pay anything.' So yeah, so there was that pain point of the transactions, but I think you know that was a big thing. You know, even going back to like social apps back then and everything, you just made everything so much more intuitive as well. And I think that's where the young people were able to understand Robinhood.
I think there was a perfect storm of three things. Number one, the mobile revolution. As you point out, financial companies were late to adopt mobile. And it was kind of like... I don't know if you guys remember this, but when Amazon first came out in the '90s, it was a little bit of a... people had to get over a hump to be able to put their credit card into a website to buy things. There was just like this idea that it's a new thing. It doesn't really feel particularly secure. Of course, now we understand it's probably much more secure than reading your number out over the phone, but back then there was a lot of hesitancy. And at the time when we started Robinhood, a lot of people didn't think that their serious financial matters could be done on a phone app. You know, they thought phone apps were for games. And so, we had to overcome that. The other thing was the commissions, right? Everyone else was charging seven to ten dollars per transaction and we lowered it to zero which was very disruptive. And then the third thing was people were just kind of like disillusioned with the state of the financial system after the financial crisis. So the financial crisis sowed some seeds of disillusionment because a lot of people saw their friends, maybe their parents losing their jobs and then the recovery over the next 5 to 10 years was very much unevenly distributed. So the financial crisis itself was kind of perceived as this sort of like screw up by the financial industry. You know, there were these subprime mortgages, these risky bets that went the wrong way and, you know, the entire market collapsed as a result of it. Nobody was punished, nobody went to jail, right? And the recovery just accrued to the wealthiest people, the top 1%. And so you had a lot of, you know, you had the Occupy Wall Street movement. You had all this sort of like societal frustration that manifested as just a lack of trust in the big financial companies. And so I think a new brand... the door opened for a new brand in the space and I think Robinhood really resonated with people because it was a little bit more of an optimistic view. We weren't saying with Robinhood that, you know, the entire system is broken let's burn it to the ground. We were instead saying if we make it easier to plug as many people as possible into becoming an owner in, you know, the best companies and what America's building then maybe that could lead to not just you doing better as an individual but like a stabler and more prosperous society.
Yeah. When did you notice more active monthly users? Like how did you get to 27 million? Is that what you said?
Yeah. I mean, I think that...
Like was there a moment when you guys looked at the stats and you're like, 'Holy [ __ ] we have...'
Oh, where... how do we end up with 27 million?
And how did you achieve... how... what did you notice that you guys did to achieve more?
Yeah, I think the story of Robinhood was really, you know, consistent product improvements that led to compounding growth. There were also these moments that were sort of like these seminal moments where we had huge increases in growth in a relatively short amount of time. So for example, I still remember the Snap IPO and Snap was very much sort of like a Gen Z, younger millennials company and everyone was excited about it and at the time that was our biggest day ever, right? When Snap went public and a lot of us don't remember it because it was so long ago. But yeah, like that was like a company of our generation going public for the first time. And then we had big events like Brexit, the 2016 presidential election where we had spikes of growth. We had COVID obviously, which was probably the first time we had growth that we weren't prepared for.
I was going to say COVID was the first time I used Robinhood.
Yeah. I mean that was just like three big waves converging to make it so that investing goes from maybe like the 15th thing in line that people think about to like top three.
Well, I was going to say I had no background. Didn't know what I was doing. Got Robinhood and it was just so easy to use like once you deposit. I remember I was like betting on gaming, Wynn Resorts for the two I bought and I thought I was like... of course you want to make money but I was like, 'Yo, this is so much fun and so easy to use' and everyone in my circle was kind of doing the same thing. So I guess just that time is when I started using it. I don't know if you ever used it but that's really what changed for me and then it makes you so interested but it was just how easy it was to do it. I couldn't even figure out E-Trade. I don't know if E-Trade was tough, but something... trade around still.
Yeah. Is that... I know it's a dumb question, but I never hear about anyone using E-Trade.
Yeah. So, what happened with the retail brokerage industry is you have a bunch of these companies that basically were not prepared for Robinhood's entry into the space. And at first, they sort of weren't taking us very seriously. They're like, 'Well, you know, our customers don't really like mobile trading. They prefer to pay commissions.' I think if you read the reactions to, you know, the industry to Robinhood in the early days, it was a lot of just like...
Like how Blockbuster, right? Like how Blockbuster looked at Netflix.
Yeah, I think very similar. And then what happened was in 2019 they had to scramble and pretty much all of our competitors had realized within a period of a couple of weeks that they had to replicate our business model which was crazy. I'd never seen anything like that. I didn't think it was possible. But like one after the other within the span of a couple of weeks all of our big competitors replicated our business model. They said, 'We're going to zero commissions.' And what happened was TD Ameritrade and E-Trade when they announced this and they kind of had their hand forced because it wasn't just us anymore, but their other big competitors, their stocks went down by like 35% in one day. So, I mean it was a bloodbath. The best analog that I can give and this hasn't happened was let's say you're a legacy car maker and all of the legacy car makers within the period of a couple of weeks said we're going fully electric. That's like the equivalent of what happened in the brokerage industry. And as a result of that, two of the big players, E-Trade and TD Ameritrade, couldn't continue on as standalone companies so they got gobbled up by bigger conglomerates. TD Ameritrade became part of Charles Schwab, E-Trade became a part of Morgan Stanley. So there's just a wave of industry consolidation into these like large asset managers.
I feel like Robinhood has... and I was the reason I was talking about like the COVID is it has like this perception that it's like a beginner app. So it's like first users that want to get into stock market. Would you agree that it still kind of has that representation of this is for new traders, people new to the game?
Yeah, I think that for a while that was our number one focus. We were laser focused on being the best place to get started investing and that was just all... 100% of our energy and you can think of our marketing went toward that. But it's not the case anymore. Now Robinhood has expanded and we have some of the most sophisticated tools for active traders. So, some people go through different paths. Some people start investing and trading and then they want to get more sophisticated, more active. They start getting interested in things like options or futures, other derivatives and you know they start trading on desktop with like their six screens with the charts and everything. So we have a path for those customers. We rolled out a product on desktop called Robinhood Legend, which I think is the best and also the fastest improving active trading product that's been doing really, really well. And we have some people that, you know, they want to invest. They don't need to be at the absolute frontier. They just want to be able to buy stocks, build a diversified portfolio. We have tools for them. We rolled out this awesome product, Robinhood Strategies, which you can think of as a just invest button on your phone. I want to put money into an account. I want, you know, Robinhood to handle everything for me and put me in reasonable stuff completely. Set it and forget it, reasonable tax optimizations, things like that. So, we do that. And a big part of what we've also been doing recently is just expanding to fill all of your financial needs. Like you should never have a reason to take money out of your Robinhood account and we should be able to help you with good products across all of your financial needs.
Oh, they were... they got excited speaking of taking money out of Robinhood account about the new feature, the...
Yeah. The partnership with Gopuff.
Oh yeah, that is crazy. Is this a cash delivery? Can you explain that to us?
Yeah, so I mean it's pretty simple. There's a product called Robinhood Banking, which I think is the best banking product out there right now. It's different than the other neobanks. The other neobanks tend to go after a paycheck to paycheck customer, right? So it's sort of like you go to 7-Eleven to get cash. We wanted to do it differently. We wanted to give you a digital private banking experience. So imagine you're a high-net-worth individual and you go into sort of like your beautiful private bank lobby with the marble columns and mahogany desk and you get treated like a VIP. That's what we want to recreate. One thing that wealthy people have is they're not going to like the ATM in the Tenderloin to get their cash, right? They have a truck delivering cash to their house. Actually, there was a great company called First Republic Bank. Maybe you guys have heard of it. It didn't survive the banking crisis of a couple years ago, but their stick was great service, private banking, high-end, and you know, they served a lot of like founders and entrepreneurs in the Bay Area in particular, but not a great digital experience, brick and mortar. And they had this... they had like the cash truck deliver money to your house, so you don't have to go to an ATM. So then we asked ourselves, can we take that experience which is really nice and legitimately very useful and make it available to the mass market? And then we realized well you can get your food delivered, you can get, you know, a car coming to your house to take you from place to place. Why can't we do the same for financial services? Why don't we? And there's been sort of this idea that the bank branch is obsolete and should be replaced by technology, but we're not quite there. There's still a lot of things you have to go to a bank branch for. Cash being the most important. So, you can think of cash delivery as our first step and the biggest step to digitizing the entire banking experience with no compromises. Like it should be better not worse to remove the branch and I don't think a lot of people have gotten that right about digital banking.
But can you just like walk us through so if I need a couple grand I can go on Robinhood and then it's partnered with Gopuff and I can get 2k just delivered to my house within an hour?
Yeah, you can within... I did it a couple weeks ago it was like 15 minutes.
I think two grand is currently the max and it's still rolling out. I think it's live in California and New York and expanding from there. So, there's nothing magical about the max. It's just we have to start.
Is there an hour limit on it? Like, is it work at like 3:00 a.m.?
I'm just wondering why...
I'm just wondering why would I need two grand?
I'm wondering the hours of operation.
We do get this question. I think right now it's not 24/7, but nothing's stopping it from being 24/7.
Are you guys the first ones to do this?
I mean I'm sure others have. There are ways to get cash delivered, you know, First Republic sort of like being...
Yeah. But yeah. I don't think anyone's doing anything like what we're doing, which is sort of like a digital almost like call it DoorDash experience for getting your cash.
I think that's the coolest thing ever. Nothing's worse than having to go sit at the [ __ ] bank and wait for maybe 30, 45 minutes to get you. And also, if you think about if you're in a major city and you need cash, and let's say like you're a young woman, right, and you have to go to the ATM, there's a legitimate safety concern, right, where it's like, well, I need to find someone to go with me. This is kind of sketchy. A lot of the ATMs are just covered in graffiti. You have the card skimmers. So yeah, I think it's obviously people like to talk about it, but I think there's legitimate usefulness for a lot of people.
What's the future of cash in America? Will we ever be like a cashless society?
I think that's a really good question. I think that a lot of people really like cash. It's still very large. I forget what the latest statistic was. I had it when we announced this product. I want to say it's like a huge amount of money like tens, hundreds of billions maybe even more are transacted in cash on an annual basis. Now the percentage is going down but is it going to go to zero? I mean you probably... I don't know if you guys heard this but I think AOL just shut down dial-up like a couple months ago.
I thought I saw that. I thought it's a parody.
I saw something on X. Yeah, dial-up internet.
I thought dial-up internet was one of the leading revenue streams for AOL up until like relatively recently and I think they just shut it down.
So I was still using dial-up... mostly older people.
Right. Like if you're in your 80s and maybe you don't really need the... you're used to it working a certain way. So will we have cash in a hundred years? Probably not. I mean, I'd be surprised, but are we still gonna have it in 25 years? I'd probably take the over.
Well, just real quick, too, there's like... It pisses me off these restaurants that aren't cashless. You can't even use cash at certain restaurants. I don't know if you've had that experience, but it's the biggest pain.
Kind of worse when it's cash only, though.
Cash in New York, you know, you still go to a lot of places, they're cash only.
This is kind of off topic, but one of my favorite phases, I think it was during COVID was like the Forex trading. Did you ever see that where people would gather at like a house and they would raise money for Forex?
Forex like currencies, trading currencies.
Do you have any knowledge on that?
I know what Forex trading is.
People really came after it for being like the biggest scam. I was just curious if you have any opinion on it.
I don't think trading currencies is inherently like nefarious. A lot of people do it. A lot of institutions do it. I think the challenge comes in when you put in like a lot of leverage and if you couple the leverage with, you know, selling trading courses and other services to people that don't really understand it. So, you know, there's a lot of people on the internet that are, you know, promoting trading courses and strategies and yeah, there's no shortage of unscrupulous characters for sure. As with anything, anytime you have a tool and the potential to make money, I think there's people that abuse it.
You guys are coming out with a cool feature, the Robinhood Social.
What's that? I saw something I don't know if it's out yet, but the Whale Watch.
Is that out yet? Like or...
It's coming out soon. Yeah, we're kind of like putting the finishing touches on it internally and testing it. So, we have it internally and the next step is to start rolling it out. And I think that's part of our thinking for traders. For a long time, Robinhood was a tool. So, you'd get the idea elsewhere and then you just go on Robinhood to trade because it's low cost and easy to use. But I think we're increasingly going to move to an all-in-one platform where you're not only trading but you also get the idea for the trade either from our AI tools like Cortex or our community.
Is Whale Watch like... we have a partner PrizePicks where you can go on the app and you can see like someone's pick for Sunday football.
Yeah. So Whale Watch is that like on... I can go on Robinhood and hypothetically see what Elon Musk is buying.
That's what you got to watch, right?
Yeah. That... Yeah. Yeah. So it's going to start out with, you know, politicians and other investors that have to report their trades. But then also, if you're on the platform and you're trading and you choose to opt in, you could...
Yeah. You could opt in your portfolio and...
So I'll be following his but I will not be following yours because when I follow your PrizePicks...
Oh, it's bad. Well then...
Well, you know there's the inverse Cramer, right? So sometimes someone that trades badly can be a good signal because you could just do the opposite. But yeah, and the other great thing about it is we're adding more assets so we have stocks, we have crypto, we've got options and futures now, we have prediction markets. You know, I think one of the reasons that these things haven't worked particularly well in the past talking about sort of financial business social networks is the variety of content isn't super rich but with prediction markets now you have trades around pretty much anything. So I think that's going to be a great tool for social trading and social media.
Yeah, I think I'll do good there. But I do think there's a big void of portfolios. You know, people, my friends will always ask me like, 'What are you buying? Where are you looking?' Like, you know, instead of like texting them like, 'Oh, look at this specific sector or this company.' I would love for them to just follow me. You know, without knowing the balance, just like this is what I hold, you know.
Yeah. And I think that's the great thing about it and why Robinhood is uniquely positioned as a social media platform. It's because we have that signal of what are your actual trades. So people know that there's some verification that you're not just bullshitting and putting random things out there.
How fair is it for like a beginner on Robinhood that's a college kid in his room as opposed to like a billionaire getting access to like IPOs and stuff like that?
I think the most fair in the industry by a wide margin. In fact, one of the criticisms we get with IPOs are that, you know, we hear from a lot of people, 'Hey, I've got, you know, $5 million or more in my Robinhood account and I got one share of this IPO, right?' And I think there's a balance. If anything, the feedback that we're getting is we've gone too far the other way and that we actually don't value or really prioritize customers that have been with us and grown with us. And we've shifted a little bit. I mean, we've heard that feedback and it's like if someone started with us when they were 20 and now they have a big portfolio, now they use us for a lot of stuff, they probably should be getting a higher tier of support. And so we launched programs like Robinhood Concierge. Obviously we've got Robinhood Gold.
I think I'm still on the waiting list for that one.
Oh, you're for the gold card, you mean?
Yeah, for the gold card. Been on my waiting list for a while.
We can hook you up with that.
Card's been very popular. Yeah, we've been rolling it out aggressively. I think we announced recently crossing half a million card holders. So the problem is more and more people keep joining the list. We can't roll out fast enough.
I've been looking at this for a while, Vlad. I'm still... How many employees does Robinhood have?
It's between three and 4,000.
Wow. So, what have you learned as you've scaled on like the best attributes as a leader?
I think a lot of the conventional wisdom about leadership that you read about is kind of wrong. Yeah, I think you really have to look at that stuff from first principles. Yeah, because there's a lot of things that are safe to talk about publicly like being nice and sort of like being employee friendly and not enough is spoken about like having really high standards. I think this is changing a little bit. I think recently the environment is shifting to where more and more people are talking about this stuff. But achieving really hard things is not easy on people. It's tough. It requires long hours. It requires like a lot of attention to detail. So yeah, I don't think Robinhood is like a great place to optimize for work-life balance by any means. It's a place where people come to work intensely and they want to have a lot of impact and they want to do in one year what would take a normal company 10 to 20 years.
How far out are we from like AI dropping like tips on when to buy or sell?
You can do it right now. You can ask Grok for a stock tip. It'll give you a stock tip.
Now whether it's trustworthy and whether it'll make you any money, that's another question. There was a study done I think it was last year benchmarking performance of AI models in picking stocks and it was funny they underperformed because they missed the AI boom. So yeah, I think it's a tricky thing. I mean if everyone's using AI to buy the same stocks will those stocks outperform in the long term? I think unquestionably people are using it across the entire life cycle, idea generation and then you know some enterprising folks are automating things and building these bespoke strategies.
Robinhood also has that feature of when I'm looking at a specific stock that I hold it says others have also purchased similar stocks. Yeah. And these are like similar stocks to what you're holding here, which is pretty much very similar to the answer I get from Grok as well. I'll tell Grok, 'Hey, I'm holding this company. What are some other companies that I should be looking at similar?' Then I'll go into Robinhood. Robinhood's recommending me...
Yeah, we can look at with our system overlap between holding of different stocks and we can just surface that information. It's a great place to look at like other stocks you want to get or you know if you're looking at let's just say for example Tesla like people who hold Tesla what else are they buying as well.
And I'm assuming it's real data, right?
It's real data, yeah. One of the things we work really hard to do is we don't want to outside of like certain circumscribed areas we don't want to make recommendations or push customers in a certain direction but we want to give them all the information that they're looking for to make the decisions. So we have some areas where we do make recommendations like first trade or you know upon request. And then Robinhood Strategies is obviously a fiduciary advisory product and then we also acquired an advisory platform TradePMR where you could get a human advisor to help you with your finances.
That's cool. But yeah, by and large, the core of the offering is self-directed, meaning you just use it to get information, but the trading decision has to come from the user.
One of my favorite phases was Roaring Kitty with GameStop. And I know that Robinhood faced a little bit of backlash for not being able to buy GameStop at a time. Was that is that accurate?
That's right. Yeah. For one day, you couldn't buy GameStop.
And what did that do to the Robinhood brand overall?
I think it hurt it quite a bit. I mean, to some degree, we're still sort of recovering from that or I should say it was probably not until 2025 that you could say we fully recovered from that hit. And that was a tough moment for me. You know, that was 5 years ago. So, I know now I look like a confident, you know, executive that's on top of everything. Back then I was kind of a kid, you know, and it's sort of like I'd been in the lab working on this software, not really talking to the media or anything like that.
You weren't public facing until after.
And suddenly it's like, oh, you got to go on CNBC, you got to go to testify in front of Congress. And um, damn. I mean, I think if I had to do that now, it would probably have been much better handled because I think the core of the GameStop issue, like if you look at what actually happened, it was like risk management, us complying with regulations. Our hand was forced essentially. And I think our competitors basically had to do the same thing, but they kind of did a better job of explaining it. Plus, they were just much smaller. So, we were the brunt of all of the anger, even though it affected pretty much everyone in the industry.
Yeah. What I like about you though, Vlad, is you know during that moment because I remember and I even remembering you go X or Twitter at the time going on TV and like there was two things. It could have either been the end of Robinhood or you keep winning and like you know and I always tell everybody like either content creator friends founders and I always even talk to Ron about this is like he won like you just if you just keep winning because the whole GameStop situation which I don't think we need to talk about much longer cuz it's 5 years ago but I forgot about it till like last night like we were talking about topics and I even went to Grok I was like hey what are tough questions we could ask Vlad and the first thing it came up was GameStop. I'm like, GameStop? That was so long ago. But like people forget. If you keep winning, people will forget. And you know, and that's what you did with Robinhood. And I'm not here to gas you up. I say this behind your back all the time with Ron is you know, if you just keep winning, people and learn from mistakes, of course. Don't ignore the mistakes, but learn from the mistakes, fix them, but just keep winning. And I think that's where Robinhood's at right now.
To some degree. It's almost it's good in a way that it came up with that because it just means we haven't had any big controversies. Knock on wood. Where's this wood? In the past 5 years.
Yeah. Right. We've had that's the best could come up with is asking about GameStop 5 years ago and God bless you.
It was a big moment too. Like I remember when it went down. And I'm just saying like I'm not throwing shade at you. I'm just saying it was like you know like a lot of people saying why are you still on Robinhood when that happened? So.
Oh no, for sure. I mean it was a big brand hit to your point. I think that what happened was there was the very sort of sexy false narrative of hedge fund collusion like oh Robinhood was colluding with all these guys and there was a rumor I don't know if you guys remember this that the White House called me and asked me to shut down trading of GameStop. Now this thing went nuts on social media. There's a Reddit post about, you know, Joe Biden in the White House made a call to Vlad Tenev. Some fake engineer had posted it saying, 'I overheard the conversation. The White House was on the horn.' And Sequoia Capital, one of our investors, had to publish a statement publicly saying that they weren't involved in this White House Robinhood thing. So, you know, the juicy narrative that's like simple and sort of like nefarious, people love conspiracy theories. So, that took hold. And I think we didn't do a good job of like quelling it. So, you ask a random person on the street, they're like, 'Oh, well, GameStop, wasn't that just like the hedge funds and Robinhood?' But yeah. No matter how much we do or what we say, people have that thought and it's hard to dispel the false rumors.
It was 5 years ago and you still got to hear about it.
Yeah, admittedly it's a little bit less just sticks, right? I forgot all about that.
What are you doing now with like cryptos becoming so popular? MoonPay does a great job. Like that's the platform I use. And how what are you doing to compete with like the MoonPays of the world?
Well, so MoonPay their number one business is a fiat on and off ramp, right? So if you want to get dollars into native crypto into like a wallet, MoonPay is almost like an infrastructure provider. And we have a product that is competitive, maybe a little bit less known, but it's called Robinhood Connect. We partner with some of the biggest wallets. We use it obviously for ourselves and significantly cheaper on average. And I'd say crypto and Robinhood evolving in a couple of different ways and it's a big business like if you look at us by market share for retail crypto we're kind of like top two but pretty close to number one in the US. And we're expanding outward. The thing that I care most about is actually using crypto technology to power real things. So tokenization of real world assets, we call it. Can we take a real asset like a stock or a private company, which is the thing I'm most excited about, and put it on crypto technology where it benefits from 24/7 trading, global liquidity and just like integration with the existing large crypto customer.
You're doing that a little bit in Europe right now, right?
Yeah, we've tokenized about 2,000 public stocks in Europe. We also piloted private stock tokens. So, we were the first to tokenize OpenAI and SpaceX shares and we gave them out to European customers in the form of a giveaway which worked incredibly well. So, we've got the technology to tokenize private companies and make them tradable 24/7 just like stocks. The obstacle is really regulatory clarity.
Yeah, I was going to say when's that to the US, but.
We're working on it. Yeah, with the US there's two barriers actually. And in Europe there's less incidentally. In the US you have to solve private company accreditation laws that make it so that right now you have to be an accredited investor basically a high net worth individual to invest in private companies. And there's also tokenization of securities which falls into crypto market structure which right now you're not allowed to actually tokenize securities in the US and make them available to retail, which is actually why you have so many meme coins. It's sort of, you know, connecting real stuff to crypto technology is illegal. And that's why the lion share of the market in the US is just things that aren't backed by real value on crypto technology.
All right, guys. I want to interrupt the pod really, really quick to tell you guys about MoonPay. Whenever I'm doing anything in the crypto space, if I'm buying crypto, if I'm selling crypto, I am using the MoonPay app. What I love about the MoonPay app is they have every form of payment on the planet. If you guys are new to crypto, too, you can own a piece of a Bitcoin for as little as $20 and you can get it in seconds. Also, Moon's been around now for 6 years. So, they're forming some crazy partnerships in the space. One of their partnerships is with Trust Wallet. Trust Wallet is one of the most popular self-custody wallets in the world. With Trust Wallet, you control your crypto fully, no compromises. And thanks to MoonPay, you can fund your wallet instantly using your favorite payment methods. It's the fastest way to go from cash to crypto, all while keeping full control of your assets. Also, every Monday we do MoonPay Mondays on our Nelkys Instagram where we give away $1,000 in Bitcoin. All you got to do is just DM us your MoonPay wallet address. We post proof that we send $1,000 every single Monday. So, if you're looking to get into crypto or you want a shot at winning $1,000 in Bitcoin every Monday, just download the MoonPay app. Do your own research, obviously, and shout out to MoonPay, the best crypto app in the game. Let's get back on the pod.
You don't have to say which one, but have you like fired on a memecoin?
I have some memecoin exposure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I won't recommend my favorite one because anytime I do that, I get a little bit of grief from pretty much the fans of all the other coins. I love all of my meme children equally.
What makes you like want to get a memecoin?
If I really believe in the community behind it. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of I think a lot of people are flippant about meme coins and they're like, 'What's the point of this?' But I think if you actually look at what's happening here, you have someone with the ability and the power to create an asset that trades 24/7 globally, gets billions of dollars of liquidity in 5 minutes or less. It's a huge capital markets innovation. I mean, compare that to what it looks like to IPO a company. You have to spend a year and tens of millions of dollars and work with like teams of lawyers. And by the way, it's still only available in the US on a limited set of exchanges, you know, primarily during East Coast working hours. So I think like if we combine these two things it becomes really interesting and that's where I think Robinhood's focus is on crypto. It's not actually the pure crypto technology. It's the intersection how can we apply crypto technology to trading and holding assets that have fundamental utility that people really care about.
Is that the future of stocks tokenization?
It's the future of private markets for sure. I think from the standpoint of a normal consumer, they're not going to be aware that their stocks are tokenized. I mean, they'll just see that, you know, it's just available. Yeah. I mean, if you look at it right now, Robinhood has a pretty good experience for trading stocks. Of course, one of the benefits of tokenization is another GameStop cannot happen. But of course, nobody is sitting there worrying about another GameStop until it happens, right? But yeah, you'll have instant settlement, which is one of the technical reasons why the whole GameStop fiasco occurred. So there's certainly benefits, but I think if you ask what can I not do now that will be made possible by tokenization, you'll be able to tokenize a private company. You'll be able to tokenize a Picasso or a work of art. So, it's these like assets that aren't liquid right now that are really hard to trade, you can plug them into an existing infrastructure that instantly makes them tradable 24/7 and liquid.
This is kind of off topic, but something that's so hot right now, and I just see it every day, and I'll use Logan Paul as a specific example. But you've seen like his Pokemon card that's worth $5 million. Do you do any sort of like the card investment cuz it's like really hot right now.
Me personally I'm not a Pokemon card collector, but there is a class of investments which are sort of like investments that also have utility. So it's not just sitting there custodied in an account somewhere, but you know you're also wearing it. It's like a piece of jewelry or you know you have it in your house like a piece of art. Even real estate maybe is in that category. So there's definitely like investments that you want to see in a spreadsheet and you want to watch the value go up and down. There's certain investments that are like collectible or have utility that you also want to use. So we're definitely thinking about that. And the goal would be for Robinhood to give you the ability to invest in everything. And not just invest in everything, but anything that relates to money moving in and out or being held in your account, Robinhood should help you with whether we're holding it for you or you're doing it yourself. And you should expect tokenization. I mean, all of those assets are in scope. Collectibles which you can think of as I mean NFTs one of the original crypto use cases was digital collectibles. So tokenization can help you digitize real world collectibles as well. I do think a card to look at though Michael Jordan PSA 10 rookie.
I don't have one but there's only like 300 and something of them and a year ago they were worth 250 grand each. The least expensive one right now you could find is 600 grand. There's only like 300 of them. I think there's like a whole economy around Michael Jordan. I say Michael Jordan. There's a lot of athletes, but like Michael Jordan's just always going to be a legend.
Dana has one. I've already showed it. He has a lot. I have a Charizard, but it's like PSA negative one. It's like it's so bent up. I have a LeBron rookie card.
I swear you did or your dad? I did. I did. That shit's gone. Any Beanie Babies? Oh yeah. Beanie baby. Are those up in value, too?
I mean, I think so. I saw something. Someone asked me like if I'm into Beanie Babies. I just don't know enough about it. I just think Michael Jordan will always and forever be a living icon. And yeah.
Yeah, I'd agree with you. Oh, not a living icon, just a legend.
For a while, I got into collecting signed books, like signed first editions.
I've got some good science fiction. I've got some signed Asimov's Foundation. Are you guys science fiction fans?
Asimov's Foundation. It's legendary books. So yeah. Sometimes one interesting thing if you had to guess what percentage of books sold in the US are digital like Kindle version versus physical. What would your guess be?
What percent are digital? I feel like it's got to be digital.
I think physical. I think most people would say it's like digital just ate into the market, but north of 80% are still physical.
I believe that cuz if you're going to read a book, if you're into reading, you want a physical book that you can and most people that buy books don't actually read them. It's like a gift. It's something to put on your bookshelf. It's like a piece of art. 90% of my books are that. Yeah. I have a huge bookshelf and people come over like, 'Did you read all that?' Like, 'No.' Yeah. I don't even know how I got it.
