Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev on AI, Prediction Markets, and the Future of Trading | Ep. 33

Vlad Tenev 0:00 We call it, uh, vibe trading. So you know how there's vibe coding? I think there will be vibe trading, which sounds a little flippant-

Jack Altman 0:06 Well, but, you know-

Vlad Tenev 0:07 I admit, but -

Jack Altman 0:07 The thing you said, that we're not a trading platform, it's like, you know, it's like a financial home. It's like vibe finances. It's like, you know, because you have all these other products, I assume it's gonna, you know, like, vibe set up my, you know, kids' Five Twenty Nine account, which is, you know, not-

Vlad Tenev 0:19 Totally. Here's the areas that I'm most interested in. [upbeat music]

Jack Altman 0:23 All right, Vlad, I'm super excited to be here. Thanks for doing this with me today.

Vlad Tenev 0:26 Well, glad

Vlad Tenev 0:27 to have you.

Jack Altman 0:27 Okay, so I wanted to start by getting sort of your historical lay of the land of online brokerage, and maybe we don't have to go all the way back, but if you could sort of just go back to, you know, maybe, like, the early days of online stock trading into sort of like, you know, Vanguard and Schwab and Fidelity, and now you've got, like, online platforms for trading that are modern, like Robinhood. Just, like, what's sort of the history and sort of the narrative, uh, as you see it?

Vlad Tenev 0:54 There's a great book about this, A Piece of the Action by Nocera. It covers basically the modern-- the rise of the modern financial industry, uh, which is super interesting. I mean, it's basically a story of a big wave of democratization associated with lower costs. So, um, Charles Schwab, uh, began in the '70s. I think there's a lot of similarities if you look back between what Charles Schwab was to begin with and kind of what Robinhood is sometimes accused of being, right? Before Schwab, Merrill Lynch was, was the big broker, and really, they had brokers that would sell you trades and call you and convince you to buy stuff, and they would charge hundreds of dollars per trade. And then after that, there was, uh... The, the event that led to the creation of Charles Schwab was called Mayday. I forget the exact date, but it was in 1972, and up until that point, uh, commissions were regulated.

Jack Altman 1:59 Mm.

Vlad Tenev 2:00 So you could not charge under, uh, a certain amount per trade for commission. And Mayday led to deregula-re-- deregulation of trading commissions, which allowed Schwab to enter the business. And Schwab said, "You know what? We're gonna cut costs. We're gonna make it as efficient as possible. So we're not gonna have branch offices. You're gonna call us on the phone. We're not gonna try to sell you anything. We'll just process your ticket over the phone, make your trade, and we'll do it for..." I don't know what it was. Call it seventy-five dollars per trade. And so they, they were in the news in the early days for creating this, like, extremely sophisticated phone dialing system that could handle lots of simultaneous... Like, they innovated-

Jack Altman 2:46 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 2:46 ... using the tools they had at the time.

Jack Altman 2:48 Mm-hmm.

Vlad Tenev 2:49 And then, in the 1980s, the Apple II came out, right? And actually, in Palo Alto, not very far from here, two guys, Bill Porter and, um, I forget his partner's name, um, Randy or something, they met at a party, and Bill Porter had just bought an Apple II computer, and he had this idea of: What could I-- What if I use this, this machine to trade stocks from my home? Um, and, you know, the two of them got very excited about this idea, and they decided to make a business out of it, and E-Trade was born.

Jack Altman 3:28 Mm.

Vlad Tenev 3:28 And of course, that was sort of the, the origins of it. It went public ten years later during the, the dot-com boom, and it became one of the first profitable dot-coms, right? For, for a long time, they were accused... The, the whole internet thing was dismissed as a fad. Nobody thought that there would be a way for many of these companies to make money. But online brokerage was, I think, one of the first, if not the first, proven business model that could be profitable in the internet era.

Jack Altman 4:00 Mm.

Vlad Tenev 4:01 So that was E-Trade, and, and you probably remember, maybe, maybe when you were a kid, they were heavy on marketing. They had that baby.

Jack Altman 4:08 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 4:08 It was kind of a cultural moment. The dot-com boom was when I started trading myself. I opened my first brokerage account.

Vlad Tenev 4:15 And then Robinhood started, let's say, what, what would have that been? 2015 was when we launched. Twenty thir- twenty twelve, twenty thirteen was when I got the idea, and our big innovation... I think, I think there were three innovations that led to Robinhood. First was obviously mobile. Everyone else had ignored mobile, and we made the bet that, you know, people were saying, "Mobile's a toy. Nobody would do serious financial transactions on their smartphone-"

Jack Altman 4:45 Mm-hmm

Vlad Tenev 4:45 ... "but that that would become primary." A- and so we, like, built for that when everyone else was ignoring it. The second bet we made was that high-frequency trading had completely changed institutional finance on an infrastructure level. So entire rooms that would have been full of trading desks, people picking up phones and, and making trades, were being disrupted by five to ten kids out of MIT creating HFT firms. A- and so we took the technology from a sophisticated high-frequency trading firm, and that became the backbone for our retail product, which allowed us to lower costs and offer commission-free trading. And at that time, commissions were still between seven to ten dollars, so that was a huge disruption. And the, the third thing, the company was sort of formed in the wake of the global financial crisis and the whole Occupy Wall Street movement. And if you think back on the global financial crisis, I had graduated Stanford in 2008 and gone to grad school. My first month in grad school, Lehman Brothers went under. It was kind of an interesting thing because a lot of my friends, the ones that were most secure in their financial careers, just all of a sudden, as quickly as they came into their jobs-- and, you know, they, they had their internship at Lehman Brothers. They got their return offer. They were very proud. They had, you know, three years of job security in front of them-

Jack Altman 6:15 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 6:15 ... and then they were gonna go get an MBA. There was this well-defined path-

Jack Altman 6:18 And then it evaporated.

Vlad Tenev 6:19 Evaporated, and you had the images of them with the-... packing up their cubicles-

Jack Altman 6:24 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 6:24 -with, with the boxes. There was just a lot of disillusionment, particularly among young people, among millennials, with the financial system, because some of this happened to them. They saw it happen to their parents. It felt like they were the victims, young people in particular, of forces beyond their understanding, that were just, like, packaging products and taking risk, making things complicated, and that there was no accountability. You know, no one went to jail as a result of crimes committed in the global financial crisis. Um, nobody big, anyway.

Jack Altman 6:59 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 6:59 And I think this really, this led to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was really a young person, a millennial thing. And, and I think it opened the door to a new brand in the space. Like, no love was lost between young people and the big financial companies. And, uh, Robinhood, along with Mobile, along with the great technology that enabled commission-free trading, I think hit a particular resonance-

Jack Altman 7:26 Mm.

Vlad Tenev 7:27 -because it was a very optimistic message in a way. It was kind of the anti-Occupy. Whereas Occupy said, "The system doesn't work, we just have to reset and, and start it all over," which I think was not really actionable, and that's why the whole movement ended up fizzling out without much impact. And we were saying, "Why don't we plug you into the system? If we get more and more people to become investors, to own the best companies, and, and we wanna make it easy and engaging and actually, like, enjoyable to do so, then we could solve a lot of these same problems." And, and I think at the time, there was a need for a new brand, and, and the story of Robinhood resonated just as much as the product and the technology.

Jack Altman 8:13 When I think about, like, Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, I for some reason, I feel like those brands were always, um, not deeply connecting with, like, the younger generation, or, like, they weren't, like, maybe going out of their way to be as loud of a brand as they could have been.

Vlad Tenev 8:28 Yeah.

Jack Altman 8:28 You know, when I think about, like, the big banks, there was definitely a lot of, like, animosity between just, like, the population and the big banks. I feel like that, for whatever reason, I feel like there was neither animosity nor love towards those brokerages. Did you experience it that way, or is that maybe just I wasn't paying attention?

Vlad Tenev 8:44 I think a lot of people lump the brokerages and the big banks into one thing.

Jack Altman 8:49 You think they get lumped into one?

Vlad Tenev 8:51 I think so. Yeah, I mean... And not even those guys, but you look at the market makers like Citadel.

Jack Altman 8:57 Yeah, for sure.

Vlad Tenev 8:57 You saw this during the GameStop era.

Jack Altman 8:59 Mm-hmm.

Vlad Tenev 9:00 I mean, there's just an association that they're sort of like these puppet masters that are-

Jack Altman 9:06 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 9:06 ... moving things around in the dark, and nobody understands. And, and I think trust in general tends to be quite low.

Jack Altman 9:12 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 9:13 Um, now, now that was at the time.

Vlad Tenev 9:15 Now, I think Gen Z and Gen Alpha, there's almost this opposite thing happening where the old, big, storied incumbents are kind of cool again.

Jack Altman 9:27 Interesting.

Vlad Tenev 9:27 And so we're trying to figure out how to navigate this scenario, right?

Jack Altman 9:30 What is that? I didn't know. Like, can you share more about that?

Vlad Tenev 9:32 I, I think there's a broader trend of things that are old and kind of, you know, maybe that your grandparents would use, uh, being cool again. So Gen Zs are really into buying vinyl, and cassette tapes are selling again.

Jack Altman 9:47 Oh, vinyl, yeah.

Vlad Tenev 9:48 Ten years ago, maybe it would've been very hard to get a cassette tape, but now-

Jack Altman 9:51 I didn't know that

Vlad Tenev 9:51 ... people are buying them. And so, you know, my daughter asked me if she could have a Walkman.

Jack Altman 9:56 Uh-huh.

Vlad Tenev 9:57 And I think in the same way, uh, financially, people are actually... Like, the, the younger generation is interested in retirement. You and I are probably close to the same age. Um, when I was graduating from college in 2008, I wasn't really thinking about retirement that much.

Jack Altman 10:14 Yeah, I was 2011, and same.

Vlad Tenev 10:16 Yeah.

Jack Altman 10:16 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 10:16 Like, retirement seemed really, really far away. Now Gen Zs are opening retirement accounts at 19 years old.

Jack Altman 10:24 Mm.

Vlad Tenev 10:24 So they're like, they're thinking a little bit more conservatively, I think, than, uh, than prior generations. I'm not a, I'm not a cultural historian-

Jack Altman 10:33 No, but it's-

Vlad Tenev 10:33 -even though I try to be.

Jack Altman 10:34 It's important context, 'cause I, I assume that, um, for a business like yours, I would think that capturing the sort of like hearts and minds of people between, you know, 18 and 30 must be super important for the long term.

Vlad Tenev 10:47 Yeah, and there's a lot of counterintuitive things there. For example, uh, for, for older people, I think we've had a lot of success. You would think with, with older customers, we would emphasize how, you know, stable and how long we've been around, and-

Jack Altman 11:03 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 11:03 ... and all these things, but, but actually, that resonates very strongly with young people, and-

Jack Altman 11:08 And older people want to hear this-

Vlad Tenev 11:09 Older people wanna be that, you know-

Jack Altman 11:10 You could be, you could be plugged into the cool new thing.

Vlad Tenev 11:12 Yeah, it's innovative, y you know, easy to use. We have all these features.

Jack Altman 11:16 Is that new for you, or was it this way for you all along?

Vlad Tenev 11:19 I think it's relatively new for us. I mean-

Jack Altman 11:21 Like, you had to invert those seven years ago or something?

Vlad Tenev 11:23 Yeah, I, I think we have to constantly, uh, change the way we think about our products, communicate our products, what we build. Uh, and I think the, the trap that we would like to avoid is, to, to some degree, these companies that came before us, Schwab, E-Trade, they're kind of stuck in a generation.

Jack Altman 11:46 Mm.

Vlad Tenev 11:47 Like, E-Trade was very popular with Gen X. It became a, a Gen X broker. Schwab, you know, average customer is in their 60s, may- maybe 70s now, so it's very much the broker of the Boomer generation. But, um, what we try very hard to do is always pay attention to the next generation, while also moving up market in the sense of being able to serve older customers, you know, people that are, are in their 60s and 70s, because they have needs, and they also have a lot of assets that we could benefit from. So we've been trying to do both over, over the last 10 years, with, I think, some success.

Jack Altman 12:24 How do you think about, if at all, sort of like-... index fund type investing versus like a more hands-on active style of trading? And I'm asking because when I think about like Vanguard or Schwab, I think of them-

Vlad Tenev 12:36 Yeah

Jack Altman 12:36 ... as like pioneers of like, you know, and champions of like the passive investment sort of mindset.

Vlad Tenev 12:41 Absolutely.

Jack Altman 12:42 And when I think of Robinhood, I think of like you can trade for free, and so therefore, you should trade.

Vlad Tenev 12:46 Yeah.

Jack Altman 12:46 Like, how do you think of those things? Does it matter? Is it, you know, people should do both? Do you strongly advocate for one or another for young people?

Vlad Tenev 12:53 When I first started raising capital for Robinhood, there was this perception that ETFs and index investing had kind, had kind of eaten the active trading market, and that there was no growth in trading, and there was all this growth in ETFs, and that was just gonna continue, and young people wouldn't want to trade. They just wanted to buy ETFs. And I think that that's not exactly true, and I think we've demonstrated that, but it's not a graduation. A lot of people ask, "Okay, well, is-- do you first start out trading individual stocks and eventually graduate to buying and holding ETFs?" What we've seen is it's not that people go from being a trader to being an investor. As their money grows, they just have more and more buckets, right? They have your retirement, long-term money, which in, for many people, is passively managed, but they always wanna have a little bit at least that they're making decisions on.

Jack Altman 13:58 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 13:58 And so we've tried to conform to that. It used to be that there was only one account in Robinhood, and I think one of the big unlocks for us in the past four years, I'd say, is figuring out how to actually conform to people's mental accounting of their finances. And now you can have, you know, over ten accounts and many different account types.

Jack Altman 14:18 Do you think of your role as just give people the tools to do whatever they think is best, or do you think of your role as w- we're gonna help create certain sort of healthy patterns and pathways for people to do the right thing at the right time?

Vlad Tenev 14:34 Yeah. So at the top level, we are aligned. Like, we make money generally proportional to our total assets under custody.

Jack Altman 14:43 You want your customers to do well.

Vlad Tenev 14:44 We want our customers to do well. We don't want them to send their accounts to zero.

Jack Altman 14:48 [chuckles]

Vlad Tenev 14:48 The best behavior for us is if someone's account balance with us just monotonically and continuously grows over time.

Jack Altman 14:55 Mm-hmm.

Vlad Tenev 14:55 I think the best way to do that is to actually conform to how customers like to use financial products, and this has pushed us to... We don't really think of ourselves as a trading app anymore. The, the way to describe what we are and what we're increasingly becoming is a financial super app. Like, we wanna be your primary and your secondary financial account. So we have Robinhood Banking, which is rolling out right now. I think it's the best banking product on the market, and if we serve customers well there, their d- direct deposit comes into Robinhood.

Jack Altman 15:32 Mm.

Vlad Tenev 15:33 And then once we've got the direct deposit, it's sort of like our assets to lose, and we look at all the ways in which customers take money off the platform. We ask ourselves, "Is that something that should be happening on platform?" And I think that's what's pushed us into this multi-product line conglomerate. It's like a financial conglomerate. You know, a- across some of our businesses, we do have a fiduciary responsibility, where, you know, the leaders of those businesses, for example, Robinhood Strategies, they spend day and night thinking about how they can make as much money for you as possible. Other businesses are, are more about selection. Like, for example, prediction markets. What do customers want to trade? How can we make sure we have the highest market share-

Jack Altman 16:15 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 16:15 ... relative to our peers?

Jack Altman 16:17 Yeah, actually, this is a good moment to sort of transition to that. Um, Robinhood has, like, a crazy number of big businesses. I think the stat I heard was eleven businesses at over a hundred million of revenue. So could you just, like, talk about, just at a high level, like, what the portfolio of businesses are?

Vlad Tenev 16:32 Uh, we organize it into kind of three arcs. So one of those arcs is, we, we call it number one in active traders. So we want to be the place where if you're an active trader, you would feel like you're at a disadvantage using any other platform, and that's where you have our options business, our crypto trading businesses, Robinhood Legend, which is a new product that we have that's active traders on, on web. I was talking to you a little bit about how there needs to be a, like, a cursor for web, if, if that makes sense, like a AI-driven, active trading-

Jack Altman 17:05 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 17:06 ... home for, for the people that are extremely sophisticated. That's what Robinhood Legend is, and that's where, uh, our prediction markets business is as well. It's like, what are the things where we can track our market share? We're, for now, sticking to regulated financial products, so that's kind of the organizing principle. And we look at our market share, and we want it to, to grow over time. The second bucket is just, we call it number one in wallet share, all the things that lead to all of your finances being on Robinhood, the credit card, our Robinhood Gold program, which is kind of the subscription wrapper-

Jack Altman 17:43 Mm-hmm

Vlad Tenev 17:44 ... that gives you a better deal on everything. We have retirement, which is now twenty-five billion in assets. We've made some acquisitions there, too. TradePMR, which is, you can actually get a, a human advisor, which will eventually grow into, hopefully, your point person for your family office, for those that have one. But the, the end game there is: how can we get all of your money in Robinhood, and how can we get everyone to be a Gold subscriber so that you just get incredible value from everything?

Jack Altman 18:12 Yep.

Vlad Tenev 18:12 And then the third bucket is, we call it number one global financial ecosystem, which is us growing our business across two linearly independent vectors. One is from retail only to business and institutional. The other is from US only or US primary to fully global. And we think, you know, in ten years-... over half of our business can be ex-US, and cut another way, over half of our business can be non-retail. So I think there's multiple vectors by which we can grow at ten X, and we're trying to kind of go after all

Vlad Tenev 18:47 of them.

Jack Altman 18:47 Can we talk about prediction markets a little bit? I feel like that's been, um, like a very interesting new category that has grown crazily.

Vlad Tenev 18:55 Yeah.

Jack Altman 18:55 And obviously, that's been like a big success for, for you all. Like, what has made prediction markets take off in the way that they have, do you think?

Vlad Tenev 19:01 This is a, a funny one because there's actually a very simple answer, and it's just one thing. Uh, the sort of like big bang of prediction markets was the presidential election last year. In my opinion, you know, I've, I've been kind of a student of prediction markets for many years.

Jack Altman 19:19 Mm.

Vlad Tenev 19:19 I've just loved them, and, uh, I remember in twenty sixteen, with the presidential election, I was like voraciously looking at the prediction markets, trying to figure out who was gonna win this thing, and at that point, there was nothing in the US. It was basically Betfair, which is a UK-based, uh, exchange that was, that was pricing the odds in real time. And, you know, you, you could tell you were watching the news. They didn't have an answer on that election for... until the next morning, when, when Clinton conceded that. Seven PM, seven thirty Pacific at night, Betfair showed, you know, Donald Trump had a ninety-five percent chance of winning. So that was, I think, the first instance where you could tell that this was a valuable new forecasting tool and source of information.

Jack Altman 20:11 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 20:11 And then in twenty twenty, it was the same thing. PredictIt was probably the main platform, which was run as a research experiment. But I remember everyone- they had this nice electoral map. They had prediction markets, not just for the, the election as a whole, but for each state, and their website crashed from so much use on election night. And for the longest time, having prediction markets for the US elections were impermissible. Like, the CFTC said no, and then, uh, there was a Supreme Court case that got resolved literally a month before the election last year. That said, "Actually, it's okay. You can, you can roll out, uh, federally regulated CFTC presidential election markets." And that surprised everyone. Like, nobody thought that this result would shake out this way. So credit to Kalshi for actually taking on that fight and, and going to the Supreme Court and, and arguing for their business. When we saw that, we basically mobilized our entire company, and we're like: We have two weeks to get this ready. We've got to be ready for, for the presidential election. And that week, we, we were actually, uh... It, it was, it was very high degree of difficulty because we, we began integrating with Kalshi for that, and then Kalshi didn't get the approval to, uh, allow other brokers to connect. So we integrated with ForecastX, which is, which is an- another DCM. But our team sprinted towards this thing. Then we had to change vendors, so we had to sprint again, and we shipped it with about a week before- a week to go before the presidential election, and we still saw, uh, I think, over half a billion contracts traded-

Jack Altman 21:57 Wow

Vlad Tenev 21:58 ... which is a big business for us. And then, what happened was essentially the same argument that you could make for why, uh, the presidential election has a lot of economic value, um, could be adapted to the Super Bowl, like a, a big sporting event.

Jack Altman 22:16 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 22:17 Clearly, a Super Bowl, huge event, lots of economic value. Uh, and then you, you could imagine, you know, if the Super Bowl has economic value, every football game has economic value as well because the Super Bowl is just a function of what happens the rest of the season, and it allows you to make those trades more granularly. And that has essentially unlocked the sports prediction markets industry, which has been a big thing.

Jack Altman 22:43 Which is enormous, right?

Vlad Tenev 22:44 Yeah, and if you look at it, it's a disruptive force to traditional sports betting because sports betting is state-by-state regulated. It's a patchwork. Taxes are quite high.

Jack Altman 22:56 Mm-hmm.

Vlad Tenev 22:56 You have this annoying effect where, you know, if you're using one of these sports betting apps in, in New York, you get shut out.

Jack Altman 23:04 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 23:04 And then you have to drive across the bridge to New Jersey, and maybe there you have different products and services. Brick-and-mortar... Rules intended for brick-and-mortar casinos have been applied to digital platforms, which I think makes a little bit less sense in this case. Um, so it's been a disruptive force, and, and for Robinhood, if you look on a contracts traded basis, it's been doubling quarter after quarter.

Jack Altman 23:34 Wow.

Vlad Tenev 23:35 And in October, which is just one month, we did more than all of Q3 put together, and I think that's a function of more-

Jack Altman 23:42 Wow

Vlad Tenev 23:42 ... contracts, not just in sports, but diversity across the board. Like, we have really interesting AI contracts, too, where you can trade what's gonna be the best AI model at the end of the year, what's gonna be the AI coding model that wins? It's just more people finding out about it, figuring out what prediction markets are, so it's getting more adoption within our user base. We're also getting new customers coming in. But yeah, I think, uh, at least definitely on the retail side, we're kind of the only broker that offers prediction markets to a significant degree right now. One of the things I'm very proud of is how quickly we, like, jumped on it. I mean, there's... Some of our competitors have been integrating and trying to do this for years, and they still haven't shipped. I think it's not just a trading product. This is a unique one, where there's actually a huge use case, uh, almost as a-... a media forecasting tool. I did, like, a tweet storm about this a couple months ago. I said, "Prediction markets, a way to think about them is they're truth machines." Like, we're bombarded by all this information constantly.

Jack Altman 24:45 Right.

Vlad Tenev 24:46 Like, anyone can write anything on Twitter, it can go viral. Uh, how do you sift through what's real and what's not, and what's actually gonna happen? Well, now we've created a tool that lets you do that, and I think the benefit is not just for the folks that are trading.

Jack Altman 25:01 Mm-hmm.

Vlad Tenev 25:01 It's almost like the trading and speculating is doing the work-

Jack Altman 25:04 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 25:05 ... so that all of us have this reliable source of information.

Jack Altman 25:08 I should've looked this up before I came here, but I feel like I remember seeing that, like, if you ask a million people to guess the weight of a cow or something ridiculous like that-

Vlad Tenev 25:17 Yeah

Jack Altman 25:17 ... it's actually very cl- like, the middle is actually very close. And I feel like that is basically what prediction markets are doing, right, is like the wisdom of crowds betting with, like, skin in the game leads to truth.

Vlad Tenev 25:28 Yeah. I think the skin in the game is the big-

Jack Altman 25:31 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 25:32 ... distinguishing feature, rather than just a poll. I mean, you could run a poll.

Jack Altman 25:35 Yeah, it doesn't, doesn't-

Vlad Tenev 25:36 But, um, yeah, it's, it's different because it's a price. This is a price. It's not a poll, it's not a guess. It's from people with real skin in the game, and I think that's- there's empirical evidence that they're super accurate, even one month before the event in question.

Jack Altman 25:49 To

Jack Altman 25:50 what extent do you think of prediction markets as, like, economic value via this, like, truthy sort of outcome from the wisdom of crowds with skin in the game, versus just, like, a cool form of entertainment for people?

Vlad Tenev 26:04 Yeah, we, we get asked this all the time.

Jack Altman 26:06 And matter of fact, by the way, I love poker, for example.

Vlad Tenev 26:08 Yeah.

Jack Altman 26:08 I think it's-

Vlad Tenev 26:08 Isn't it just gambling? But the thing is, every tradable asset has had that criticism-

Jack Altman 26:15 Mm-hmm

Vlad Tenev 26:16 ... over time, right? Futures contracts, where people have been speculating over the price of oil or the price of gold. I mean, this was a huge fight back in the, I think, '60s, where a lot of people were on both sides saying, "You know, retail shouldn't have access to, to these products-

Jack Altman 26:33 Mm-hmm

Vlad Tenev 26:33 ... because it's just speculation." But, but I think, yeah, another word for gambling is speculation, right?

Jack Altman 26:40 Well, but also, I mean, there's nothing wrong with gambling, really. I mean, like-

Vlad Tenev 26:43 Pu- put aside that, and, and I agree. Um, without speculation, you can't have, uh, a functional financial market, so we need the speculators.

Jack Altman 26:53 Mm-hmm.

Vlad Tenev 26:53 Otherwise, things just don't work. You need people that have a view on what's gonna happen in the future to create the market. And, and I think most people would agree we need the market. But that said-

Jack Altman 27:04 Well-

Vlad Tenev 27:04 ... I don't think everyone should be speculating with-

Jack Altman 27:06 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 27:06 ... 100% of their money.

Jack Altman 27:07 I mean-

Vlad Tenev 27:07 That's an extreme case.

Jack Altman 27:09 I have no... I'm just thinking out loud here for fun, but, like, I suppose maybe the counter there would be, it's useful to get price discovery on, like, a, like, an equity asset or something like that.

Vlad Tenev 27:19 Yeah.

Jack Altman 27:19 But there's not particular value to getting price discovery on the outcome of the Ravens game or something. I, I, I imagine there'd be some counter like that.

Vlad Tenev 27:27 Yeah, and but, but it's, it's definitely the case that ha- that has value, because any forecast has value.

Jack Altman 27:33 And the politics is a good example, where there's obviously value to knowing the truth.

Vlad Tenev 27:35 Well, just think about how much money is there in informing people and, like, commenting on what's gonna happen to that Ravens game.

Jack Altman 27:44 Totally.

Vlad Tenev 27:45 People buy the newspaper to read the sports section and see the commentary. You're listening to Sports Center. And I think that's just gonna become a bigger and bigger part of the economy. Like, let's say we get to this future where AI is automating more and more jobs, right? One of the things that probably will be difficult to automate is entertainment and sports with real humans. So I, I would make a bet, actually, that this just continues to grow.

Jack Altman 28:14 Mm-hmm.

Vlad Tenev 28:14 And, you know, the, the lion's share of jobs and job families that we consider in the future probably look to us like some form of entertainment today.

Jack Altman 28:25 Totally.

Jack Altman 28:26 One of the things that, um, I asked Dylan Field about on the podcast the other week, that I think maybe kind of relates to prediction markets, it kind of relates to some of the other things we've been talking about, is I have this sense that, um... I think to some degree with, you know, today's young people, but I think it's actually with all of us, there's, there is some growing degree of, like, a financial sort of, um, aggression, or like, you might- like, the negative way to say it might be gambling. As a positive way to say it might be risk taking.

Vlad Tenev 28:56 Yeah.

Jack Altman 28:56 I think it shows up in a lot of ways. Like, obviously, prediction markets are an easy thing to point to. I also gave the example, um, when I was talking to Dylan about, like, collectible cards, kind of, you know, that, and, like, NFTs, and you have these, like, you know, small things that, you know, people start speculating on like crazy. I think a lot of behaviors that people have just in general have gone sort of the way of, like, a lot more, like, risk, I would say. And I don't think that's a bad thing, but to me it seems like a thing. And I'm just curious if it's something that you've noticed, if it's something you've thought about at all, how you think Robinhood's, you know, suite of products can, you know, channel that in positive ways. I don't know, I'm just curious how you think about it.

Vlad Tenev 29:35 Yeah. I actually think that it's not a huge fundamental change in people's mindset, but more what they have access to. So, for example, uh, it used to be very difficult and cost-prohibitive to invest in individual stocks. I think there's a big reason why, why ETFs had s- extreme product market fit. Because before ETF came along, if you want to be invested in 500 companies, you're not gonna buy 500 individual stocks. You could get that diversification, uh, quite simply and easily. We're on a trajectory where people want more granular ways to express their opinion about things. So one example I can give you is, how many times have you seen a company just blow out their earnings estimates? Like, they, they blew out EPS, they blew out, uh, uh, revenue, but the stock goes down.

Jack Altman 30:34 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 30:35 ... folks get frustrated because they're like, "I'm a student of this company. I figured out, you know, I have a pretty good model of how well they're gonna do," but the stock might not always be a perfect representation of that. So, you know, then you have prediction markets for EPS and revenue, where if you have a point of view of how something's gonna shake out, you can actually trade that more directly. Options trading, I think, i- is part of this trend, too, where maybe you do wanna hold a company for a very long time, but you have a view that it's gonna do well this quarter. So you can design a contract and trade it profitably based on that viewpoint. Then you have, you know, zero-day contracts, which take that to the extreme, which is, "I have a pretty good idea of how something's gonna do today," and maybe it's an earnings day, and you don't wanna take the time decay risk. So I think in general, even though to some degree these are called more complex products, there's a certain simplicity-

Jack Altman 31:34 There is, yeah

Vlad Tenev 31:34 ... in that so many things drive a, the value of a stock, but, like, these contracts let you express a more granular point of view. And, and I think the other thing is they just weren't available easily. You would have had to be very, very sophisticated to have unique access to have them in the past. Um, and now, you know, through tools like Robinhood, w- we make them available to traders with costs that are really low. And then I think the third thing is you hear a lot about it in the news, predominantly because it's more interesting than, like, buy and hold passive investing. Like, everyone wants to write about options trading and prediction markets and crypto-

Jack Altman 32:12 Right

Vlad Tenev 32:12 ... because it's speculative-

Jack Altman 32:14 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 32:14 ... and you have big swings. Nobody's interested in writing the story about how, you know, index funds are gaining AUM or money market funds are seeing huge inflows, even though that's also happening. So, so I think it's the combination of these three things that makes it seem like there's a huge-

Jack Altman 32:31 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 32:31 ... increase in, in speculation.

Jack Altman 32:33 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 32:33 But I think on a relative basis, the story is much more tempered.

Jack Altman 32:36 I mean, it's probably also true what you're saying, where, like, if in the year 1950, you gave people, you know, a smartphone with an app that let them bet on the baseball game they were watching, a lot of people would have bet. And so I think-

Vlad Tenev 32:46 Hundred percent

Jack Altman 32:46 ... the tooling probably is just expressing, you know, like, human interest to do various things. I guess, you know, if-

Vlad Tenev 32:52 There was spec-- there has always been speculation.

Jack Altman 32:55 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 32:55 When you look back, Isaac Newton-

Jack Altman 32:56 There's just been a lot of friction in the past, though-

Vlad Tenev 32:58 Yeah

Jack Altman 32:59 ... I guess. Like, now the abil-- like, the EPS example is really good. 'Cause I think a lot of times people are like, you work really hard to, you know, take a certain view on a company, and you have confidence in it, and then you bet on a proxy, which is, like, share price goes up.

Vlad Tenev 33:12 Yeah.

Jack Altman 33:12 It's a good, it's a good example.

Vlad Tenev 33:13 Totally.

Jack Altman 33:14 There was a trend over time that I do think is, like, harder for young people, is it does seem like it is, um... Like, compared to, and may- maybe this is sort of like a, a, a not truthful nostalgia, but I think, like, it probably seems to be the case that, like, our parents' generation had an easier time, like, buying a first home than today's, like, recent college grad or something like that. So I do wonder if there is, like, a long-term trend that does make it harder to, like, get on the financial ramp for people out of school, whether it's to do with, you know, home prices going up on a relative basis or something to do with, you know, inflation or, or, or I don't know what else. But it does seem like there is a long-term directional trend where it's harder for young people to, like, get into the place in their financial life that they want to get to at a young age.

Vlad Tenev 34:02 I think that's true. I think the social safety net has kind of frayed a little bit. I mean, you, you have the homeownership's becoming a little bit more difficult, a lot more difficult-

Jack Altman 34:13 A lot, yeah

Vlad Tenev 34:13 ... in the Bay Area, perhaps.

Jack Altman 34:14 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 34:15 You also have the student loan burden-

Jack Altman 34:18 Which is like a disaster.

Vlad Tenev 34:19 Yeah, the cost of education, uh, has just continued to inflect.

Jack Altman 34:24 Yeah, it's gone nuts.

Vlad Tenev 34:24 I mean, I, I went to Stanford, and when I was there, the tuition plus room and board was, like-

Jack Altman 34:30 Fifty?

Vlad Tenev 34:30 ... forty to fifty, right? And now I think it's, like, eighty to ninety-

Jack Altman 34:34 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 34:35 ... um, which is insane. And state schools have kind of encroached upon the forty to fifty level-

Jack Altman 34:42 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 34:42 ... for, for in-state tuition in some cases. So yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of problems.

Jack Altman 34:47 Cars. It's probably, like, a lot of these, like, sort of like, common goods have just-

Vlad Tenev 34:51 Yeah

Jack Altman 34:51 ... gotten hard to get.

Vlad Tenev 34:52 There's a lot of, there's a lot of that. That's a huge problem, for sure.

Jack Altman 34:55 I would think that would be a big opportunity for you, though-

Vlad Tenev 34:57 Yeah

Jack Altman 34:57 ... to engage with people young and find some way to sort of give, you know, products that can help them get there.

Vlad Tenev 35:03 Well, you, you know what's gone the other way?

Jack Altman 35:06 Hmm.

Vlad Tenev 35:06 Trading commissions. [chuckles]

Jack Altman 35:08 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 35:08 In our generation, trading commissions were, like, a hundred dollars per trade-

Jack Altman 35:12 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 35:12 ... when, when I was born, and now they're zero. So when, when you hitch it onto the technology wagon, yeah, thing, things get taken to zero pretty quickly.

Jack Altman 35:21 Another thing along these lines I'm really interested in is, now as a, I suppose, as a venture capitalist, you know, a, a lot of value gets created in private markets.

Vlad Tenev 35:29 Yeah.

Jack Altman 35:29 And I think as companies, I mean, you're public, but a lot of, you know, peer companies that are of similar scale are private, and a lot of value compounds in private markets. And, um, I think that's becoming more true every year, and so maybe, you know, this touches on, like, the tokenization of everything type of idea, where, like, one way that you could help, you know, bridge some of these gaps would be to, like, give people access to some of these hard-to-access, you know, equities.

Vlad Tenev 35:54 Yeah. I mean, th- this is something that I'm personally very passionate about. I think that it's one of the biggest iniquities in capital markets. It wasn't too long ago, I mean, a few years before, uh, we were born, Microsoft and Apple went public at valuations in the hundreds of millions.

Jack Altman 36:14 Right.

Vlad Tenev 36:14 Right? Or maybe low single-digit billions.

Jack Altman 36:16 And then, like, ninety-nine point nine percent of their value, you know-

Vlad Tenev 36:19 Was created in the public markets, yeah. And, and you still see examples of that. Right now, you're seeing a lot of companies that are worth hundreds of billions-... like at the frontier of their industries. You know, not, not just open AI and Anthropic, but also SpaceX, which is leading the, the space revolution.

Jack Altman 36:36 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 36:36 But before they're available to retail, it's, it's not hard to imagine that they're gonna be in the trillions, right? And then what kind of appreciation? To get a, a Microsoft IPO till now appreciation, they're gonna have to get to a quadrillion of value.

Jack Altman 36:52 It's tough.

Vlad Tenev 36:53 It's gonna be tough-

Jack Altman 36:54 It's a lot of billions

Vlad Tenev 36:54 ... I mean, without hyperinflation, right?

Jack Altman 36:56 Yeah. Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 36:57 Um, so yeah, I'm very motivated. I think ex US, we've- we're, we're pushing on tokenization, which I think is probably something like the end state. A lot of people have to get comfortable with the implications of it, and it's, it's really gonna be disruptive.

Jack Altman 37:12 Can you explain how it would work or works?

Vlad Tenev 37:15 At the fundamental level, it's, it's basically the same idea as what stable coins are. You have some traditional financial stuff that you put in a bucket, and, you know, in stable coins, it's US dollars and treasury notes, and, and bonds, and you mint and burn tokens against that. The traditional stuff stays in the bucket, and the tokens are freely tradable on blockchains. So you can imagine twenty-four seven liquid trading round the clock, just like a stock, and the only time tokens change hands with shares is in like a mint-and-burn scenario.

Jack Altman 37:53 Mm.

Vlad Tenev 37:54 So another analog is, you imagine, uh, it, it's kind of like an ETF or an ADR. You have a bunch of stuff here, like S&P 500 ETF warehouses, the underlying stocks. The ETF is traded freely, and then at some point, very rarely, you have a mechanism that exchanges the underlying for, for the ETF, which is mo- more of an institutional product. But yeah, you can extend this concept with blockchain technology to anything.

Jack Altman 38:23 Mm.

Vlad Tenev 38:23 So you can put private stocks or SPV, LP interests in the bucket.

Jack Altman 38:28 Do you think that's where things go in the US over time?

Vlad Tenev 38:31 I think so. Yeah. I think that it's, it's really hard to imagine, uh, a cleaner solution. I think a lot of people talk about on-chain issuance. I don't think the end user gives a shit about on-chain issuance or really any of this. The end user just wants economic exposure to things in a way that works. Um, a- and I think some mechanism of this... And there's a lot of questions to be answered, right? So currently in Europe, this, the structure is a, a derivative, but this is more of like, um, paperwork thing, right?

Jack Altman 39:06 Mm-hmm.

Vlad Tenev 39:06 The underlying mechanism could stay the same, and the regulatory description of it, and what it is, and whether you get ownership or voting rights, that could all change. So I, I think there's gonna be questions of: Is it a derivative? Is it a tokenized stock? Is it a new thing? Uh, do you get to vote your shares? But we'll, we'll be able to make it at least as good as, fro- from an experience standpoint, as the existing things that are out there.

Jack Altman 39:33 Obviously, everybody talks about, like, AI. Now, I'm, I'm curious how much of a, an impact it has been for you to date and where you think it's gonna be the most impact in the future.

Vlad Tenev 39:43 A lot of people speak about this in generalities, don't they? I think that-

Jack Altman 39:47 Well, if you just speak in generalities, then everybody just, you know, make, you know-

Vlad Tenev 39:50 Yeah, yeah.

Jack Altman 39:50 Value goes up, so you just say AI, and it's good.

Vlad Tenev 39:52 Yeah, I, I like to measure things. I think we're very, um... Yeah, we, we, we pick the areas kind of internally that we thought AI would make the biggest difference for us, and then we spent a lot of time trying to- we continually spend time thinking about how to measure it and how the progress should go.

Jack Altman 40:11 Did you have any guesses that you thought would matter, and it didn't, and then were there any where, you know, you were surprised in the other direction?

Vlad Tenev 40:17 The two areas where we really invested big time in were customer support and engineering-

Jack Altman 40:24 Right

Vlad Tenev 40:24 ... which I think were the two most, i- if you had to think about-

Jack Altman 40:27 Yes

Vlad Tenev 40:27 ... where human capital really matters, writing code determines how fast we ship products-

Jack Altman 40:32 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 40:32 ... and fix bugs, and improve infrastructure. Customer support's, like, the frontline interface-

Jack Altman 40:37 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 40:37 ... with our system.

Jack Altman 40:38 Yeah, and I think outside of chat, those are probably, like, the biggest two AI markets so far, so that makes sense.

Vlad Tenev 40:42 Yeah, and so customer support, we measure AI deflection rate.

Jack Altman 40:45 And it's worked super well.

Vlad Tenev 40:46 Worked super well. And with deflection rate, which, um, y- you probably can, can, uh, uh, understand, but I don't know if most viewers w- would, you kind of look at, uh... It's a measurement of what ticket would've gone to a human, but instead has been fully solved by, by AI.

Jack Altman 41:06 What'd you get to?

Vlad Tenev 41:06 Um, I don't know if we've announced that publicly. Um-

Jack Altman 41:10 But something good.

Vlad Tenev 41:11 It's, it's relatively- it's very high. I think it's the best in the industry-

Jack Altman 41:15 Mm

Vlad Tenev 41:15 ... actually, and we, we do all this work in-house. We don't use vendors.

Jack Altman 41:18 Have you measured if it doesn't just, you know, save costs by, you know, not touching a human, but have you measured if there's also higher satisfaction on the way the ticket was handled? Like, is it both a better experience and cheaper?

Vlad Tenev 41:29 We do measure that, and I think the story is complex. Um, and the reason is, there's some percentage of people, call it ten to 15%, that just don't like talking to an AI agent. They have, you know, predisposition to, to not like that. We actually track that number, and that's going down over time, too-

Jack Altman 41:47 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 41:47 ... which is very good.

Jack Altman 41:48 Yep.

Vlad Tenev 41:49 And then we have to do all this work to make the agent try to convince them, right? It says, "Actually, I'm very helpful. Give me a try," you know? "The wait might be quite long." [chuckles]

Jack Altman 41:57 Like, shut up, agent. Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 41:58 Yeah. [chuckles]

Jack Altman 41:58 It's good.

Vlad Tenev 41:58 Yeah, it's, it's getting better and better, and there was an incident a couple of weeks ago where our AI customer support agents actually went offline for a few hours. Immediately, the phone started ringing like crazy.

Jack Altman 42:10 Mm.

Vlad Tenev 42:10 So then we, we have, we have clear, direct evidence that the deflections are actually real. We haven't talked much publicly about-

Jack Altman 42:17 It's cool, though

Vlad Tenev 42:18 ... progress there, but we're doing an AI event in a couple of weeks, and, and I think that one will be good. And then engineering, we look at, obviously, number of lines of code that are contributed by, by AI, and we also look at overall-... like, commits per engineer per month, and both basically have been going up and to the right. And, and I think for those areas, those are probably the important things to track if you're an entrepreneur, like, if you're looking for metrics. And I think they're controversial because the engineers will say, "Oh, well-

Jack Altman 42:51 It's not about the lines of code, it's about the quality of each line." And you're like, "Yeah."

Vlad Tenev 42:55 Yeah.

Jack Altman 42:55 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 42:55 Exactly. Um-

Jack Altman 42:57 But-

Vlad Tenev 42:57 But-

Jack Altman 42:57 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 42:57 ... let's look at the data-

Jack Altman 42:58 Of course

Vlad Tenev 42:58 ... and just-

Jack Altman 42:59 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 42:59 ... investigate more deeply, right?

Jack Altman 43:01 We actually, I remember we found that it was, um, not ju- we, we did, like, a sort of like a core sampling on this. We found that engineers who contributed more lines of code also contributed higher quality per line of code.

Vlad Tenev 43:11 We've seen the same thing.

Jack Altman 43:12 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 43:12 Yeah, yeah. The two, the two aren't as contradictory as, as you might-

Jack Altman 43:16 They're not

Vlad Tenev 43:16 ... you might think. And then I think the next one is just marketing and creative output. You should measure the total throughput of marketing creative, and also, like, the lion's share of that should be generated by AI. I think the tools at this point, uh, are good enough to where you, you can actually move the needle

Vlad Tenev 43:35 in a big way.

Jack Altman 43:35 I feel like the, um, the cursor idea you mentioned should be very interesting. If at some point you can get to a place where you, like, sort of trust Robinhood enough to just sort of tell it, "Here's what I'm looking for, both in the short term and the long term. Here's my risk appetite, here's the products I want. Just, like, go make it all happen," it's like-

Vlad Tenev 43:51 We call it, uh, vibe trading. So, you know how there's vibe coding? I think there will be vibe trading, which sounds a little flippant.

Jack Altman 43:57 Well, but, you know-

Vlad Tenev 43:58 I admit, but-

Jack Altman 43:58 ... the thing you said, that we're not a trading platform, it's like, you know, it's like a financial home. It's like vibe finances. It's like, you know, because you have all these other products, I assume it's gonna, you know... Like, vibe set up my, you know, kids' 529 account, which is, you know, not-

Vlad Tenev 44:10 Totally.

Jack Altman 44:11 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 44:11 Here's the areas that I'm most interested in. So I think vibe trading and going down that path of helping first active traders, but eventually seeping into more general use cases with indicator analysis. Right now, these guys are writing code in languages that you and I have never heard of, to write these custom indicators and, and different scanners. So we can turn that to English, and we announced that through our Robinhood Cortex for Legend product-

Jack Altman 44:41 Mm

Vlad Tenev 44:41 ... at our, uh, active trader event a few, a few weeks ago. We have stock digest and crypto digest in-app, which actually are really cool, like, incredible feedback from users so far. Basically, the way it works is, you get a notification saying some stock or crypto is up 5%. You immediately want to find out what's going on, and so we actually give you a digest and a product that explains, and it, it's up- it's accurate up to seconds or, or low single-digit minutes, and that's been really good. So, so you could imagine AI unobtrusively being this, like, assistant, and some- in some cases, autonomous financial agent for many of these things. I also think that there's just some really, really boring stuff that's very hard right now, that we're gonna push to fully automate. So, moving your bank account. I don't know if you've ever moved a bank account, but it's a pain in the butt.

Jack Altman 45:41 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 45:41 You have all sorts of bills that are hooked into it, all sorts of subscriptions.

Jack Altman 45:46 Totally.

Vlad Tenev 45:46 And I think at some point, you'll just press a button, and that bank account will move. And the first companies that figure out how to do this are gonna have a pretty big advantage, because, like, it's considered a very sticky thing precisely for this reason. Nobody wants to go to the effort of, you know, changing their credit card number or their, you know, ACH information for 20 to 30 different things.

Jack Altman 46:09 Yeah, you don't even know what you forgot.

Vlad Tenev 46:10 Yeah, you don't wanna even think about it. And yeah, that's just, that's why it doesn't happen. I think if we can... If, if, if it becomes a button, and I think it's headed there, right? Then, you know, it's gonna be very disruptive to a lot of incumbent firms. Moving brokerage accounts, same idea. Very complicated. They don't wanna make it easy either. Like, your counterparties are not interested in having, like, a streamlined integration.

Jack Altman 46:36 Totally, but, uh, I guess an agent that read all of your documents from the old brokerage could figure out everything that you needed to know, I suppose.

Vlad Tenev 46:43 Yeah.

Jack Altman 46:44 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 46:44 Yeah, it could be like, you know, when- if you have a person doing this on your behalf, and-

Jack Altman 46:49 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 46:49 ... they make the calls, they talk to customer support, they have access to your emails-

Jack Altman 46:54 Yeah

Vlad Tenev 46:54 ... uh, there's no reason why an AI agent won't be able to do all of that work for you.

Jack Altman 46:59 Yeah. Maybe just to, um, finish up, um, I guess you've been doing this for over 10 years now, and, um, obviously, you know, over $100 billion public company, but you still have, um, I know, like, an intensity, a drive, like, to keep going. So I, um, I guess one thing I'm curious about is, where have you found the sort of drive to stay hardcore detail focused, like-

Vlad Tenev 47:21 Yeah

Jack Altman 47:22 ... you know, founder through, like, you know, both a lot of years, but also it's like you've gotten to, like, a level of success where it would be easy to not fight so hard, but obviously you're pushing the boundary on so many things at once.

Vlad Tenev 47:33 I think that the one amazing thing that you have as a founder of a company, that I don't think is as easy if you're an employee or even a senior executive, is ultimately you have a lot of control, right? So if there's something about your company that doesn't work well, um, or that you don't like, or you find yourself having to say things to the employees that you don't agree with, I think that's a, a, a good opportunity to reset and, and to change something. You either have to change something about yourself or about your policies or what you're saying. I think I learned this during COVID, which was a, a hard time for us for, for many reasons, but also for me personally, um, was some of the folks in the company, uh, maybe also, like, the press and what you're hearing from the internet, pushed me into the directions where I was just, like, saying things that I didn't really believe in. Like, "Oh, we really care about having the best health and wellness benefits so that our employees can feel good and, you know, you can bring your whole self to work." And I noticed that I was saying things that I didn't really believe in, and I think that's the source of ultimately a lot of unhappiness. And at the end of the day, as a founder, I think the company values have to be your values. The way you run the company has to be the way you run your life, to some degree. And I became unhappy when there was a disconnect, and then I, I figured out, "Ok- okay, actually, this is why I'm unhappy. I have to fix it."

Jack Altman 49:06 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 49:06 And the, the good thing was, you have the power to fix it, because you're- if you're lucky enough to still be running your company as the founder, then it- the buck stops with you, for, for better and for worse.

Jack Altman 49:17 And I'm sure you've just gotten much more confident to, like, call- like, you see it and make changes as time's gone on, and you have more years doing it and everything, too.

Vlad Tenev 49:24 Yeah, for sure. And I think I have to... O- obviously, we're doing very well right now. Uh, there were times where we were doing quite poorly in the eyes of other people, and I've been through maybe, like, two or three of these cycles.

Jack Altman 49:37 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 49:37 So I know there's probably gonna be some time in the future where-

Jack Altman 49:40 Is there any-

Vlad Tenev 49:40 we're shitheads again, and-

Jack Altman 49:41 Do you do anything in the good times to, like, bank any of the, like, good vibes or any of the just, like, sentiment? Like, can you bank any of it for the hard times, or is all you can do just know it's gonna not always be good?

Vlad Tenev 49:52 Good question. Um, I try to go on more podcasts. [chuckles]

Jack Altman 49:56 Yeah.

Vlad Tenev 49:56 Yeah, maybe, uh-

Jack Altman 49:57 You gotta-

Vlad Tenev 49:58 ... most people don't wanna talk to me, right, when, uh, when we're, when we've done something bad. [chuckles]

Jack Altman 50:01 I'll go on with you in the next podcast.

Vlad Tenev 50:02 [chuckles]

Jack Altman 50:03 We can run it back. Well, Vlad, this was super fun. Thanks a bunch for doing this with me. I really enjoyed it.

Vlad Tenev 50:07 Yeah, likewise. [upbeat music]