Vlad Tenev on Robinhood's evolution into a financial super app — private markets access, AI customer service, and Harmonic's IMO results

Vlad Tenev. How you doing, Vlad? Good to meet you. What's up, guys? Good to meet you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining. Um, give us uh can you give us a little bit of a state of the union on Robin Hood? You've launched so many different products. Like, how do you see the shape? How do you define?

Are you a financial institution? Uh, I remember when I first used the product, probably almost a decade ago now, I guess. Uh, uh, it was it was an app and now it's a company, now it's a business, now it's an institution. uh what is the shape of the company today and how has it evolved?

Well, first off, our mission hasn't changed. Our mission has always been to democratize finance for all. And what that means to us is we really see Robin Hood as the defender of free markets.

And we're building a financial super app, a platform where all of our customers can custody and hold any financial asset or conduct any financial transaction. And obviously it started with stocks but it's expanded across multiple domains.

We have a credit card which in my unbiased opinion is the best credit card on the market. Banking which is a high-end uh private banking inspired offering is coming out very soon.

We offer I think the best retirement account on the market for u the self-employed entrepreneur folks that might not have access to a traditional 401k. So really we've been on this journey and uh we we've increasingly been expanding the scope and capabilities of what we offer.

Does that mean something like I when I think about uh like legacy financial institutions I think about like an auto loan, a mortgage like is that coming down the pipe?

I mean I'm I'm sure you can't comment on specifics but just like that shape of experience for consumer finance like what are all the touch points as you kind of plan the next uh the next phase of growth? Yeah, I mean the the scope is broad, right? Any financial asset, any transaction.

We actually a couple of months ago started piloting a mortgage offering in partnership with Sage Home Loans and surprisingly, you know, I announced that on X and it was probably one of my best performing tweets of the year. I mean, people are people are really interested in these types of offers from Robin Hood.

uh the focus is really on daily habits, the financial products and services that you use on a daily basis. But I think serving our customers well with those gives us the opportunity to do these one-time offers.

And you know, you could imagine if we serve you well with your banking needs, we would be sort of like your first call if if you want a mortgage. And I think the rapper behind all this is our Robin Hood Gold program.

So at at first when I launched when we launched this there was skepticism because subscription products never really worked in financial services but we've seen this interesting thing where someone joins Robin Hood usually to buy a stock or or a crypto y they sign up for Robin Hood gold very quickly our attach rate for you know day one has gone up quite high and then once they become a gold member they look at what else is offered in in the gold bundle and even if they're not ready for that service like a mortgage right away.

We usually are top of mind if they ever you know become interested in something like that in the future. How do you think about services broadly over the long term?

I think uh our generation oftent times saw you know having somebody at your bank for example that you could call and talk to as kind of a bug right and and then at some point you realize hey this is actually a feature.

It's actually great to have somebody on the other end that you can call if there's an issue or things like that.

Yeah, it's a different different margin profile, but but how are you thinking about that side and especially in the context of of um AI and and giving people that ability to kind of have these like new ways of of interacting with platforms.

I could I could imagine a world in the future where somebody can call their you know call Robin Hood call effectively call Robin Hood and have a conversation with the platform and that person not necessarily even being human. Yeah.

I mean we're already basically there uh you can have a chat interaction with a Robin Hood agent and the majority of our cases are handled by our in-house AI.

And I think people don't realize this about Robin Hood, but you know, we've looked at where we are relative to others in our industry, and I think we're best in class. Like, we're doing very sophisticated things with AI, both internally and uh in the product through Robin Hood Cortex.

the service model has evolved and and I think what it's going to look like in the future is if you're a customer that's high net worth or a little bit older and and we serve an increasing number of these customers as time goes on.

I mean, I'm I'm uh talking to customers on a semi-regular basis who are thinking about moving hundreds of millions uh into their Robin Hood account and I I wasn't having those types of conversations a year ago, but we have Robin Hood concierge that gives you a hightouch experience for those types of customers.

And uh the aspiration of the AI team is let's just make sure the baseline level of support that everyone gets is world class with like an increasing amount of sophistication and and I think we've been making a ton of progress and like I mentioned already I think best-in-class in terms of how we use AI.

How do you uh let's talk about IPOs. That's like the number number one thing I wanted to get your kind of updated thinking on. Um, I'm curious how you expect the IPO process will evolve. Obviously, we we covered the Figma IPO live at NY. It was an incredible uh day.

It was unique to our industry because it's a product that many I'm sure everybody that's listening to this has used at at some point or another. Um, but there was uh certainly a frustration from the retail community and I'm sure even a frustration from your side, right?

people were able to get into uh get in at the IPO price uh but not necessarily as much allocation as as uh some would have liked. Uh I'm sure you were doing everything you and the team were doing everything you possibly could to get as much allocation for uh your users as possible.

But how do you think that process is evolving now that you know we have millions and millions of investors in the United States that are smart enough to know when they want to get in you know um and uh at the IPO at the IPO which is just a completely different shift from a decade ago.

I mean we have we have multiple ways of going public with direct listings, traditional IPOs, spaxs like the landscape's changed a lot and the appetite for these products has changed too. Yeah. So, I'm curious like what what kind of change you're personally pushing for and what role Robin Hood will play in that. Yeah.

And by by the way, a lot of my friends were with you guys there. Uh, you know, Andrew Reed from uh Danny I believe uh was there as well. So, yeah, shout out to those guys. Uh early Robin Hood investors as well. Great.

Um our our approach to this we you guys probably know four years ago we rolled out this product IPO access. Uh we started with uh some companies that were going public in 2021 and then our own IPO had at the time the the biggest or if not one of the biggest retail allocations of over 20%.

And at first it was it it was kind of a challenge to get companies excited about this. there was skepticism about the value of retail. Uh the companies were concerned that you know retail would would sell and they wouldn't hold.

And over time that's shifted to the point where you know nowadays uh the majority of companies that are interested in going public are coming to us and talking to us about retail. And I think that's an awesome shift. And uh where I'd like to take that is even earlier in the life cycle.

Now we're helping companies and retail get access to IPOs, but can we go to latestage privates? Can we go early stage privates?

Can we go uh seed rounds where actually Robin Hood can offer capital as a service to entrepreneurs and we can deliver a button where you know you you press the button maybe you issue some information and you get capital for your business deposited directly into a a Robin Hood account for for you to operate.

And I think let's kind of go could we go through could we could we kind of talk through those specific stages and and kind of what the product would look like.

So, so on the one hand, latestage privates, uh you uh o over the summer uh you had talked about uh uh tokenized products that that could uh involve late stage privates. That's super exciting. Uh how how are those conversations going? This is such a like hot hot button issue.

obviously companies and and CFOs that are that are worried about, you know, being marked to market, but it's ultimately something that everyday retail investors want so badly, right? People are smart.

They know they know that they know they can identify generational companies and and and CEOs and teams and they want they want it. So, it's going to happen eventually, right? But at the same time, there's this incredible kind of friction at this moment in time in order to get to that point. Yeah.

Uh so I I started making a public stance on this whole thing with an op-ed in the Washington Post in January and I think that uh OpEd was basically universally acclaimed. People got very excited about it. Everyone's on board, but of course I'm not one to just write opeds. I I think a lot of people are doing that.

I want to go and do the thing and actually execute uh on on these things. And uh as it turns out, execution and and whenever you're the first to do something, it's uh it can be a little bit messy. It can be a little bit unclear. But uh going back to our mission, you know, we believe in free markets.

We want people to own the means of production to to the greatest extent possible. AI can be this massive transformative force. And I think it's very very important to have everyday people aligned with that. Right?

If if you're worried about AI having disruption on the labor market, um you could either fight it, which you're more likely to do if you have no ownership stake, or if if you have an owner, you're you're kind of rooting for for that innovation. So, I'd like to live in that latter world. And we see a path.

We have the technology to do it. We've had a lot of companies actually come to us and they they want to be a part of providing access to to private markets.

And I think at first there will be a little bit of like hesitation just like for IPO access, but I think 5 years from now we'll be looking around, retail will have access and we'll we'll all wonder why we were so foolish and uh and and having such resistance to to being in this world.

So, I'd like to accelerate that and and I'm very motivated to to make this happen in a way that addresses everyone's concerns, even the companies with the real time pricing that that you mentioned. Totally. Yeah. It it's it somebody needed to come in and just rock rock the boat basically, right?

Like it w it wasn't, you know, it seemed obvious that it wasn't going to happen totally organically or it has been happening, but in ways that aren't necessarily good for investors, right?

like the the meme from the last week is everybody's being offered these like incredibly layered SPVS and uh that that just shows that like capitalism is going to find a way to allow this demand to find supply but if you have all this friction it's not going to happen in a way that actually is is good for for the demand side and I think this is an incidental I don't think anyone sat around the table and said you know we don't want retail investors 80% of the unacredit of of the market that's unacredited to not have access to you know the leading innovation companies of our era.

I think it was incidental in the past couple of decades it's gotten harder and harder for companies to go public.

there's more, you know, process uh it's a greater burden and some companies are just avoiding it alto together and at the same time the private markets funding environment for startups has gotten much easier to the point where you know now companies can raise tens of billions if not more in the private markets and and I think the outcome of that the collateral damage is that retail is not getting access to the leading company in the space the emerging space industry and many of the leading companies in the AI industry which I think is uh yeah that should be allowed to continue.

How do you how do you think about offerings? Uh you mentioned potentially at at one point having retail be able to access even earlier stage opportunities like you know maybe seed or series A.

How would how do you kind of uh what's your vision for for that kind of product given that a lot of Robin Hood users are going to be you know used to to making investment and maybe changing their mind about it and getting out of it and uh as we all know if you you back a company at seed you're riding with them for a very long time and maybe you can make you know maybe there's features that would allow you to to to let people get out over time but I'm curious kind of what what your vision for for that would look like.

Yeah. Um I think the interesting point is that the customer and the market are slightly different between an early stage seed investment and a late stage private. Mh. So early stage seed investment uh there's primary capital. Your market is entrepreneurs that are in need of a capital as a service offering.

So whether it's onchain or offchain, what I what I think would be very attractive is pressing a button, putting in some information and getting money into your business bank account as easy as possible. When I was a seedstage entrepreneur, I spent half my time fundraising, if not more.

And so the time at which your time is most critical and you need to build your product and make sure your business works, you're spending a ton of time trying to fundra. So I I think it's very very valuable if you lower the friction to to getting capital.

You'll get more startups, more entrepreneurship, which is great for the long term.

So there's one uh if it's a late stage private your market increasingly becomes secondary transactions from early shareholders and employees and and I think that's very very different and I think uh any any private offering um has to like deal with these realities that that you have to have two slightly different customers and constituents and I think where they failed in the past is by treating them kind of as one.

Um, so we're thinking a lot about this. Um, I I think as time goes on, I'll get much more specific, but yeah, I I think what what you'll see is various mechanisms. The way the way it's going to work is Robin Hood will get exposure through various means to these assets.

We'll hold them in a box very much like how stable coins work.

you know you get exposure to dollars or treasuries hold them in a box and you know distribution overseas uh will have tokenization as kind of a delivery mechanism and in the US it'll be u tokenization hopefully once the regulatory environment matures around that but but there's also lots of other means to to give access to privates is there a risk that companies wind up like changing their docs to try and push back against this.

I remember forward contracts were pretty popular in the secondary market for a while and then companies started saying, "Hey, no forward contracts early employees like you got to go to us because we have a roofer and we want to offer that to our The beauty of a forward contract is Yeah. Yeah.

But, you know, they they they they they like capitalism finds a way as always. But I'm just wondering if there's other like layers of abstraction that might be more dominant.

like uh they don't have nearly the brand with retail traders, but there's a world where you're you're slicing uh venture funds and offering those to retail traders and then the companies might be a little bit more uh on board because the because they like they don't wind up with a retail army that's, you know, like upset with their latest product release or, you know, monitoring them.

Uh they but they might still see the economic upside or exposure. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think all of those are right. I mean, some some of those vehicles exist already. Um, and like you said, I I think we'll find a way. I do think over time, um, companies will see the value of this.

It'll be right now the companies that are coming to us for IPO access see that when you have a an established retail base as a public company, uh, there there's certain advantages, right? Your customers are also active shareholders in in many cases. Y uh they they can defend you.

They can give you good feedback, but they're a constituency that, you know, companies are beginning to value more and more. They want to hear from them.

They want to encourage retail participation and and I think you'll see that at earlier stages because companies will believe and and I think it's true that cultivating retail interest early uh has a compounding effect as as you go public and and even beyond.

Uh I I I know this story has been like beaten to death, but uh we talked to Mickey Malca about the the the round that came together in the middle of the night uh during GameStop, but I'm interested to hear just about uh what has changed technically and then financially and then from a brand perspective in terms of like the going through that cycle, making it through, but then just having a lot of folks out there who are like ah like I had a bad experience and and I'm I'm still I'm still holding the grudge.

How do you win them back? Uh what's the strategy? Uh both on the actual like business building side and then the messaging, the changes that you made like what's the full postmortem? Yeah, I mean it's uh there's this phrase that trust is slowly gained and can be lost in an instant.

And uh I I have validated that that's basically true. When uh when January 28th the the date that will live in infamy and Robin Hood lore came down, we saw you know hit to our NPS obviously on social media and across every channel. It was abundantly clear that customers were unhappy.

And we've had to climb out of that slowly over time. And I think there have been moments where we've sort of like gained a net promoter score. It's clear that, you know, we've done good things and we've sort of like accelerated earning trust from customers.

But there's no magic formula where I snap my fingers and say the right words and and suddenly, you know, you make up for that. I think that it's it's done by delivering on our value proposition and being sort of like a consistent trusted uh member of of the ecosystem for many many years.

And it was probably like a year and a half ago where it became clear like okay we've like shaken off um and turned the corner and and I think we've been we've been on a great trajectory since then with some of the highest net promoter scores in the past four years and customers are very very happy and you know I think we just have to keep executing.

There's uh there there's the only way is through right? Yeah. Yeah. No, it makes sense. Jordy, as somebody who runs uh a platform that uh actually uh facilitates stock trading at scale, what gets you excited about the potential of tokenized stocks?

I think there's a lot of people that are more cryptonative that that uh are very excited about the potential and they talk about how easy it will be to trade and and trans transition in and out of positions. And somebody might say, well, I can open uh I can open my brokerage right now and do that today.

Um, and so that's that's maybe a a luxury of being in in in a great market like America, but where are you particularly excited about the intersection of of uh traditional finance and crypto? And where do you think uh there might be uh unnecessary or or uh hype is overblown?

Well, I think that in the same way that stable coins have become a great delivery mechanism for US dollars outside the US, uh, tokenized stocks will be a great mechanism, probably the dominant mechanism for US shares being delivered to retail outside the US. Interesting.

uh inside the US uh there is benefit going from 245 which we offer through Robin Hood 24-hour market today to 247 uh as well as self custody and DeFi applications I I think um we we haven't scratched the surface for what those can be yet but as the regulatory environment matures I I think there's a lot of really interesting potential um and it's also the cost of operating because more and more of what's traditionally been applications and you know centralized third parties run by by humans more of that in crypto is being replaced by software.

So you have you know transfer agency, payment processors, clearing houses, all of this is just uh now in software and and what that allows us to do is lower the cost and eventually if you lower the cost enough the value gets fastpacked to customers.

So I view it as you know the next stage in the technological evolution of financial services going from you know pen and paper filing cabinet to mainframe to cloud and then blockchain infrastructure is the the the next stage in that. Yeah. Yeah.

It feels like there's this like almost barbell uh emerging within Robin Hood where you are going like more individual expression. The ability for a single retailer uh retail investor to buy a single share in a preIPO company that's like an incredibly high agency thing to do.

And then simultaneously you recently launched managed investing which feels like at the opposite end of the scale. And I'm wondering if you see this more as uh is this like a funnel where people move from one group to the other? Are these distinct groups?

And I'd love to just hear more about the managed investing product. How's the business going and how that how that weaves into the rest of the landscape of the product you're building.

Yeah, I think the end state is um going to look less like people graduating from self-directed trading and active trading to, you know, retirement and and more passive products and more that uh customers are going to have multiple accounts. Sure. So, you'll have your discretionary self-directed account on Robin Hood.

You might have a joint account with your spouse. You'll have your retirement account. And some of those will be passively managed and others will be uh actively managed by by uh by yourself.

And I think that as we've gotten deeper into understanding our customers, we see that it's less two different groups of people, even the active traders are interested in retirement products and sometimes have an even larger bucket of their capital that is managed on their behalf.

And so that's why, you know, we've been focusing a lot on the customer experience and the technology front on serving your broad financial needs. How has your uh you know approach to running the company changed having having been in the game for uh over a decade now?

I can imagine uh in the earlier days when markets were ripping broadly, there's all this activity.

Yeah, I'm sure it was easy to get kind of caught up in the hype a little bit and uh I'm sure now I would imagine you've you've you've uh kind of adapted to try to stay as level as you possibly can when when uh you know we've been uh joking around on the show recently counting up how you know you you you certainly need more than 10 fingers to count all the different top signals.

So, how do you how do you kind of uh stay even keeled even when markets are euphoric and and wild in so many ways? Yeah, I mean it's much it's much easier to stay about your wits when things are improving, right?

uh even though it can be challenging I think when when markets are going up and everyone's looking at you know increased stock prices whether it's our employees or you know investors we we just like to tell ourselves we shouldn't get complacent we've got a huge opportunity in front of us the job's not finished um and then you know at the same time in 2022 when interest rates went up and you know our stock traded below $7 a share air who's trading basically at cash value.

Um you have to tell people that um you know you have to make sure people aren't discouraged and they they they think that there's you know a wonderful future worth fighting for both outside the company and the environment and and also here.

So, you go through enough of these and I think we've been through multiple waves of of ups and downs and I I'd like to think I've I've developed a little bit of a wisdom about it through experience, right?

I I I started the company writing all the code or a large portion of it myself and you know you sort of evolve with the company and I I I think I've been fortunate to be part of ups and downs and I think now I just uh I I enjoy all of it you know bring bring it on and it each one is a learning experience and an opportunity to kind of like develop some more tools in the toolbox.

Totally. Can you give us an update on harmonic? I was about to ask Oh yeah. Um so harmonic is building mathematical super intelligence and what that means is um we want to build something that can solve math problems at a level exceeding the best humans.

Um I I don't know if you guys were uh math people in your in your uh uh school days, but we actually recently I dro I dropped out of differential equations. That's where I topped out. Differential equations are are hard and very useful. Um but uh yeah, we'll have machines doing them for us. So appreciate that.

Um yeah, essentially we uh developed a model called Aristotle that has gold medal level performance on the international mathematical olympiad which is a very difficult test. Offthe-shelf AI models like GPT5 Gro bore all the things that you can use don't do well on this exam at all.

Um so this is one area where humans still do very very well relative to the AIs and the reason is when you have a a very difficult mathematics problem um it's not just like computing big numbers right it's you know logical difficult challenges that require a spark of genius and actually require you to take nine or 10 correct logical steps and and if you're an AI model that hallucinates if you get one of those wrong, the the result is is done.

So what you have to do is build a a very strong way to verify the output of of your AI model, which means that uh you have to control hallucinations and you have to make sure every uh line or piece of output uh follows logically from from what happens before it.

And we think that this is going to be a new paradigm in AI models. And it's a little bit different than what everyone else is doing because uh nobody's really tackling the the verification problem. And more and more of our software code is going to be written by AI.

And we're we're in a future already where the job of an advanced software engineer is no longer to write code, but it's to like review code that's written by AI. And as that becomes more voluminous, you know, the humans reviewing it is both uh a very sad existence for our top software engineers, also impractical.

You're not going to review hundreds of pages of stuff. So, Harmonic uh has figured out how to solve this problem. I think the applications are beyond just math, but uh any domain where accuracy is critical from computer science. Well, I'll give you I'll give you an example.

So, C-pilot, uh they've they've added uh the ability to add C-pilot to Excel, but then they had to add like a heavy disclaimer that basically said, don't rely on this. Don't rely on copilot for anything important because we make mistakes and I think that hallucinates and all the calculations in them, right?

And uh yeah, I think I think it's a big problem not just for spreadsheets, but you know, think about control systems for autonomous vehicles and all of this safety critical code. Uh in order for AI to be used to generate it, we need to solve this hallucination problem.

Did your team find problem six on the IMO as difficult as everyone else? It was this combinatorics problem. It seemed like everyone was struggling with it. Um, are there any glimmers of hope for solving that or is it intractable? Is it some sort of wall that we've run into? Yeah.

And what are your ambitions for next year with the IMO? Are you guys going to take Go for the perfect score. So, we we had uh we had proofs for five out of the six problems, formal formal proofs that didn't require humans to verify. Y uh we did not solve number six even though I was really hoping that we would.

But yeah, it turns out that the solution to that problem was uh a tiling. It was a tiling problem, but the solution was the exact tiling used uh at the at the floor of the Sunshine Coast airport in Queensland, Australia. Which is where uh which which is where the IMO was held this year. So, the human had an advantage.

They all walked through that airport. They were given the answer. Interesting. That's a fascinating piece of lore. Thank you for sharing that. That was all right. So, next year have a humanoid. Oh, yeah. The humanoid all around the city of the location, scan that into the the context window.

The the the full IMO contestant experience uh context window is important. Oh, ne next year for sure problem six and problems like that will will definitely uh will definitely be solved. Yeah, the the pressurees the pressure will be on for you guys because it's the main it's the main thing.

you know, the other labs can be like, well, we we we do math, but we're really consumer. Yeah. No, this is Well, I don't know. I mean, once you have the gold medal, I guess the the perfect score is a is a is a big accomplishment, but I think our sights are a little bit higher.

I think we're interested in kind of two things. One is solving a unsolved problem in science and mathematics and actually contributing to the state-of-the-art in one of these quantitative fields like the Remon hypothesis if you guys are familiar. Stokes same thing. Yeah, if we could solve that.

Uh Navier Stokes is u I'm less excited about because I'm I'm more of a theorist. But Remon hypothesis would be good. Yep. Um, also just delivering this technology to individuals and corporations in a form that they could actually use.

So, I think there there's lots of things coming, but uh, another IMO gold medal maybe maybe isn't top of the list. Last question. Have you uh have you did you give Terrence Tao a call to Harmon on this on the show? We were like, who who should give him a maxed out contract? Just uh, what are your thoughts?

So, I I don't know if you guys knew this about me, but I was a math PhD student at UCLA, and I actually went to UCLA to uh study under Professor Tao. I had no idea. That's amazing. I I know I know him very very well. Yeah, that's great. Fantastic. Well, yeah, some good outcomes there. Yeah, I was joking.

Seems like he does great stuff. I had a non-traditional background starting harmonic. I got a math, Ph. a new parental at UCLA. That is fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Great. Appreciate the updates. We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. And we have Mark Cuban joining the stream.

Uh we invited him on after him and Jordy got in a little timeline in turmoil AI advertisements. We have a lot more news on the front of AI ads. We have more news on what Meta is doing with AI. We have more news on what uh OpenAI is