Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder & CEO @Robinhood: The GameStop Saga & The Future of AI | E1222

So now Robinhood has eight business lines that generate 100 million a year or more in revenue, and that's up from, I think, three a few years ago. And some of them benefit from higher rates, some of them benefit from lower rates. I do think Robinhood is, is actually stronger in a declining interest rate environment than in a rising.

Ready to go? Vlad, dude, we've known each other for a while. I'm so excited to have you in the studio. Thank you for joining me.

Well, thanks for having me. It's good to meet you in person and be here in person.

You know, it's so lovely to do it in person. I wanna go from like, you know, a very cheery, happy start to actually a kind of a reflective one, which is, I think we were just talking about this, the celebritization of CEO-ship, seeing people on television, seeing a strong leader, and everything just looks up and to the right. And I think we are shaped a lot by our past. When you think about your past, what challenging moment do you think defines who you are today most?

Being an immigrant, moving from Eastern Europe to the US, that was probably, like, one of my earliest memories, right? When my family actually, right after the Berlin Wall fell, had an opportunity to move to the US. Like, ver- very little travel was happening from Bulgaria, which is where I was born, to the Western world, but these people from University of Delaware came and were impressed by my dad, who was a professor of economics in, uh, in Varna, Bulgaria. He got an opportunity to come to the US, but, of course, we didn't have the money to send the whole family, so it was, like, him coming by himself for a year, just trying to make it work, trying to build a stable foundation. And then my mom came, uh, a year after him, and so I was at, I wa- I was living with my grandparents, and, like, they were taking me to school, and I didn't see my dad for about a year and a half, my mom for at least six months. And my aunt, who I think was a teenager at the time, she was, like, into grunge music. She loved Nirvana and Soundgarden.

(laughs)

She took me, uh, to America on what was my first plane flight. And I remember when I, when I kind of, uh, landed at JFK, JFK is kind of the... It was like the new Ellis Island, right, where the migrants would, would first come. I landed in JFK, and I saw my parents, and I hadn't seen my dad for a year and a half. It was almost like meeting strangers in a way, and I was just, like, very shy. It took me a little bit of time to open up. I was hiding behind my aunt's leg, just sort of like, uh, uh, peeking, peeking with one eye out. Um, but, uh, being apart from my parents, I think, I think was tough, um, but also had the benefit of making me independent and, you know, moving around to different schools, going from the school in Bulgaria near my parents' apartment to the school near my grandparents' apartment to being dropped in kindergarten, i- in the US without speaking any English. You know, it's, it was a little bit terrifying. Like, you're just in this new place, you can't even speak the language, you're in school, um, and it was a little bit scary at the time. But it taught me to just adapt to different situations and to be very flexible, and I think that's helped me much later in life.