Robinhood's Vlad Tenev on record $1.31B quarter, 13 revenue lines over $100M, and the Platinum card launch

Speaker 1: Just do it. Stop making excuses. Up next, we have Vlad Tenev from Robinhood. He's the cofounder and CEO, back for the third or fourth time. Vlad, how are doing? You're coming back to the show. What's up, guys? We got new sound effects. We got new sound effects. Great to see you. How's it going? The market's in turmoil. There's obviously crazy news with situational awareness, but how are things going in your world?

Speaker 4: Things have been strong. We announced earnings, and we had a really strong quarter. Mhmm. Record revenues, 1,310,000,000. Total platform assets, all time high over a year. Yes. And we had more records on trading. So records again with equities options, prediction markets. Mhmm. And we launched Trump accounts as well as Robinhood chain and and tokens. We're doing a lot of stuff. Mhmm. I think the thing that I'm most excited about is, you know, wrapping everything together. I don't think any company is pushing broad individual ownership as much as Robinhood is. I think that's important not just for individuals but also on a societal level. You know, I think I think we're in a very fragile spot right now. And plugging more people into owning real assets, giving them more of the upside, more of the benefit could lead to a more stable and prosperous society.

Speaker 1: How difficult is it to actually when you say unify everything, I imagine that there are there are regulatory considerations. There are also just UX trade offs that feel like I don't I don't know. It feels like it's more human taste than AI. It feels like it's not it's not so much like the code that goes into the app, but real decisions about the hierarchy of different products in your app on the website, for example. How much of your time is spent thinking about the, like, the Robinhood super app, like how you actually design these things? How human is that versus you can sort of a b test your way there?

Speaker 4: We spend a lot of time thinking about that. And you can't a b test everything. Right? Like, you can't, a b test the name of the product, the front door, what's on the App Store pages. Yeah. Yeah. I'd say up until a couple years ago, we were very much trying to rev up the product engine, putting all the pieces in place. Now we 've got so many pieces. We launched 13 new products at our previous event. The world is flat. And an increasing amount of time to spend on kind of this coordination and how many apps should we have, the main app, like what goes into it, how do we surface the right things to the right people, how do we push personalization. So yeah, I spend a lot of my time on that. So

Speaker 2: we've been in this AI, the bottleneck cycle, the age of bottleneck investing is probably not over, but symbolically maybe over with the situational awareness situation today. But something I think that there's a lot of American retail investors that for the first time were was like, oh, wait. I wanna own this Korean stock or I wanna own this Japanese stock because this toilet company is in the bottleneck path. How is that changing? How how you're thinking at at Robinhood? Obviously, you wanna make sure that if invest if there's an asset that investors wanna buy, like, your job is to make sure that they can do that. But markets are complex and and, you know, all these regions are are quite different. Mhmm.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, I I have many thoughts. I think that, you know, we we were hearing from customers that they wanted Korean stocks. Right? And so international stocks were one of the features peep people wanted, but I don't know. It was probably, like, top 15, top 20. Right? It it wasn't one of the top features. And then suddenly, maybe last quarter, every single conversation I would have, people are like, when are the Korean stocks coming? Why can't you bring them faster? Right? And then and then you saw some of them started getting ADRs listed, leveraged ETFs. And I think I had two minds of it. One, obviously, we intend to offer every asset. We want if people wanna trade it, we'll we'll offer it, to them to trade. But also, when you start hearing that everyone wants Korean stocks, it it should raise alarm bells that maybe something could be slightly overheated Mhmm. At least temporarily, which I think is is what ended up happening. I think it's interesting too that Ken Griffin, is in the middle of this. You know, a lot a lot of respect for Ken Griffin. Just, you know, you can tell he has pure love of the game, loves what he does, you know, maybe maybe in the way that a Pavarotti is, you know, the the art of the opera singer and, you know, Trump Trump obviously make makes deals. Ken Griffin provides liquidity in the most challenging and uncertain of times. So, yeah, him him being in in the middle of this, buying the constitution

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I thought I thought that I was very view him as like a a shark, like a very large shark, like a megalodon that has an important role in the ecosystem where sometimes he, you know, is, you know, you maybe don't wanna be

Speaker 1: Well, is just said on by the shark fins. He's like the final boss of tech stories where the constitution, Dow, all all the energy was intact. It was this thing that happens and then at the last second, it's like, let me introduce you to Ken Griffin. And then the same thing with the situational awareness story. It's like purely a tech story for, you know, months and months and months and the domain of Twitter and podcasts. And, there's like one or two Wall Street Journal articles about it, but then all of a sudden, it's Ken Griffin at the very Yeah. How how

Speaker 2: about a month or two ago, there was a like, this sort of narrative bubbling that, like, the West Coast had just, like, eaten the East Coast, and, the East Coast was just having less relevance. Right? And you could see this in the performance of all bunch of the hedge funds on the East Coast. You look at their performance relative to Leopold's and you're just sitting there like, you know, what is what's what are they doing on the East Coast? Are they just sort of asleep at the wheel? And then, you know, the events of the last twenty four, forty eight hours or at least since Friday have shown that like, yeah, maybe the East Coast like has learned a lesson or two about the way that that markets work in these cycles. And and I feel like Robinhood's been in a position where it's like very much a West Coast company to me, but at the same time you guys have, I think now at this point, like, probably more respect than any West Coast tech company for traditional finance and and that whole world. So I'm curious how you Did you ever kind of like buy into that narrative that tech was eating finance or did you always see it as just wishful thinking?

Speaker 4: I mean, think certainly there's some truth in that technology which had at its epicenter Bay Area, you know, Silicon Valley has disrupted lots of industries. I never really looked at it as a coastal thing. It's not like, you know, rap music or or anything like that, where you're of in your neighborhood, you know, offering offering the technology. Everything's fully global. And, you know, I'm sitting here in New York. Usually, I'm in Menlo Park. We've got offices all over the world. New York's probably our second biggest, and now it's it's increasingly global thing. I think a lot of these people are a you a lot of the hedge fund folks are working remotely and now out of California. So I I don't know if yeah. I don't know how much of it is actually

Speaker 2: Yeah. Location based. Well, think part of the interesting story for or, you know, we we were talking with Shkreli earlier and he was like kinda walking us through like, if you're a hedge fund that's getting margin called, like, what that's actually like. And it's like, for being a technology focused hedge fund, it's still the irony of it all and even an AI focused hedge fund, the irony of it all is like, it sounds like if you're a hedge fund that's getting margin called, you're spending a lot of time on the phone with your prime brokers and you're trying to like it's not really as much of a technology problem as like you're working with a lot of people and a lot of different buyers and there's all this game theory of like when, you know, trying to exit positions without letting other funds know that you're know, it it just seems like this yeah. It's like a very fascinating, like

Speaker 4: When the stakes are high, right, it it ends up being down to relationships. Yeah. I think, yeah. I I think, you know, algorithms and automated processes are great for the typical case, you know, the 99% scenario, but I think humans still have to get involved at the extremes.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Mhmm. It feels like retail crowd, for the most part is, like, extremely I mean, it's all just very power law driven. So I would imagine like even though oil has been like a super interesting market this year, it wasn't quite as interesting or didn't have quite as much attention as like the bottleneck trade. And certainly like, you know, crypto has been, has probably gotten less attention Yeah. This year than than many of the years prior just because it was like, well, if you can buy some stock that's trading at a $100,000,000 and it can go up to 2,000,000,000 in the span of a of a couple months, like that's what gets people really interested. Is that is that is that that track with with what you guys are seeing? And like how on on the commodity side, what what are you guys doing on on that front? Is there a lot more things you can do at the product level or did you had you already sort of established like is is trading oil on Robinhood as good as it as as it's gonna get?

Speaker 4: Yeah. I think there's there's obviously more we can do. We have great future trading products. We have a great mobile experience. We have a trading ladder. I don't know if you guys have tried it, but it's, like, very tactile, easy to use, particularly on mobile. Futures business has been been growing quickly as well. One of the things we announced this quarter is we've got 13 business lines, so lucky number 13, generating $100,000,000 in annualized revenue or more. So we added two more this quarter, Robinhood Legend, which is our pro trading platform. And and that a big part of that is actually futures. Futures traders love the desktop interface, and it's just much easier to see the chart and and have the news and and everything all in one place. So Robinhood Legend got to north of a 100,000,000 annualized, and the Robinhood Gold Card crossed into

Speaker 2: a 100,000,000 as well. So Yeah. The last number I remember was nine. At some point last year, you had nine business lines doing over a 100, so added Wow. Even even more. Yeah. Added four since then. Like

Speaker 4: I had this analogy that it was like adding cylinders to a high performance vehicle. So now that we're at 13, I'm probably close to needing another analogy.

Speaker 2: But yeah, it's remarkably diversified. Don't anybody's got the w Or

Speaker 1: no, sorry, sorry. No. It's the Bugatti. Bugatti. Has has the the v 16 now. Maybe I've got three more. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Somewhat related to Jory's question. It's very interesting that when you identified a new product request, Korean stocks, You were just stack ranking it based on customer demand, not really financial volume. It felt very much like when you talk to customers, that's just what they're asking, and it's just maybe showing up in forms and feedback and requests. And I'm interested in other markets that might sort of pattern match to that where there's a lot of money moving around, but it's maybe lower on the priority stack. And I'm interested in how you're thinking about compute futures because that feels like that could be a very big market sort of ensuring data centers and providing some sort of derivatives market on top of compute, which is a massive market. But when I think about it, I feel like some of those big numbers might just come from a hyperscaler who gets an insurance contract from their bank when they go to build a big data center complex. And it might not actually be the, like, the vast majority of the volume might not be driven by retail at any point in the future. And so I'm wondering how you deal with new financial markets that are going to be big, but you don't you don't see a lot of demand from them. How do you think about reasoning through how you should play in that market?

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, I think if we have strong conviction, we'll add it even before it becomes a huge asset class in terms of volume. I think we did that with crypto. You know, we added crypto in 2018, and it was many years of next to no volume until end of twenty twenty when suddenly it just really inflected. So compute futures, yeah, if there's a lot of demand and if people are trading them and if institutions are using them to hedge, of course, we'll look to add that. I don't know if we're seeing much of that yet. I think the tricky part about that is it's typically a rapidly depreciating asset. So I I think those tend to not make for for very good markets. But Yeah. You know, you you are in a unique situation where compute on a on a per on, like, a given architecture tends to be increasing in the short term. Yeah. I don't know how long that'll last, but I I think that's that's rather unique in history, and we'll see if it's the same in Yeah. In the next two to three months.

Speaker 1: Can you take me through a little bit more of the story of the Robinhood Gold Card and how it's changed, how you're positioning it, how it's evolving, what's driving the growth?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So what's driving the growth is very simple value prop, 3% cashback on all categories, is much bigger than what you'd get with a typical credit card. Yeah. You know, it's market leading. And so when we find that the best products are easy to explain to your friends, they grow through word-of-mouth. Mhmm. And, you know, if someone asks you, well, why would I use this credit card? You have a very simple answer, 3% cash back on categories. And of course, the user experience is nice and you have virtual cards and family features and we make it really good around the edges. But I think the the clear reason that's easy to explain is is a big part of it. So we're now at above a million cardholders with the gold card. I mentioned earlier a 100,000,000 in in annualized revenue for the card business. And last week, we started rolling out platinum. So we have

Speaker 2: we go. Guys. Yeah.

Speaker 4: Platinum. Yeah. We've got, like, a growing card portfolio. I think the platinum card is really, really good. Mhmm. We if you haven't checked out the website, I I really just sometimes I just scroll through the website and look at all the great things that that we're offering. The Platinum card is a a highlight, I think. I love

Speaker 2: Robinhood Social. What's the latest there? I've been seeing some screenshots. It's already providing a lot of entertainment even for people that are not using the platform yet. But how's it going? Yeah. I've I've seen those too.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. Yesterday was was a big day. Yeah. So Robinhood Social is something I'm really excited about. It's growing. We're rolling it out. It's not out to everyone yet. The reason for that is we've just been iterating on all of the details. Building a social network from scratch is pretty complicated. There's a decision about what type of content you want to allow people to post. And at first, we started with only trades, and we came to the conclusion maybe that was a little restrictive. You want to give people a little bit more freedom to post charts and things like that, to post comments, maybe news stories, but you don't want to give too much freedom. So we've been iterating heavily. We just added politician trades as well, which have been doing quite well. Mhmm. And, yeah, now you're starting to get to the point where you have legitimate influencers on Robinhood Social with, you know, thousands of followers, and we're still rolled out to a relatively small portion of the customer base. So I think we've we've got good signal that it'll do well and it'll be useful. And yeah, yesterday, it sort of like transitioned to people posting Robinhood social content on X, which is very interesting. I think the unique differentiator that we have that makes it compelling to people is that there's actual trades and real portfolios tied to the account. So we can combine these two things, you know, real transactions with opinions, and that gives you a primitive that you can't find easily in other social The content,

Speaker 2: you know, you see somebody post on X, like, just closed out this position, like, you know, can my I'm updating my thesis or whatever. Doesn't have the same weight if they are doing that and they either printed on it or, you know, are took a meaningful loss. So Yeah. It's great content. I have one last question.

Speaker 1: You've been very early and very bullish on mathematical superintelligence. There's been a whole bunch of conjectures solved. It feels like a total validation of your idea that AI would be very good at mathematical problem solving. How have you processed the recent, conjectures that have been solved by various models? How does this update you? Do you have like a next hurdle that you want the AI to solve? Because it feels like I mean, I know people are still throwing like the Riemann hypothesis and P versus NP at it. But aside from that, do you have like an idea or vision of where this goes?

Speaker 4: Yeah. I think that's an awesome question, John. So the next thing is the same way that I applied my mathematical skills to computer science, you know, I was a mathematician and then I became a business person, what we found is that math skills and coding actually go hand in hand. So what I'm really excited about now is applying mathematical superintelligence to software. So in the same way that MSI can be used to make sure that your math is correct. When you have a computer program or a piece of software, it can be used to make sure that's correct and that there's no mistakes. And I think particularly now when we have mythos finding security bugs and you see all the scary stuff like we saw last week with the hugging face breach. Rather than it being a cat and mouse game of just escalating model capabilities, finding breaches and preventing breaches from happening, verification and proof that software is immune to these types of bugs, I think, is the future. You're So gonna of see

Speaker 1: software systems that you use and there could almost be like a I mean, you know, you go to those websites and it's like there's a security certificate at the bottom and no one really knows if it does anything. But in the future, you could actually land at a website where the entire code base has been formally verified.

Speaker 4: Yeah. And now the absence of the security certificate is a red flag. Browsers will block it. Yep. I think you're gonna see it first in domains where accuracy and correctness are critical. Sure. So you're you're seeing it a lot in crypto, actually. With crypto, formal verification Yeah. Just having a bit of a moment. You're gonna see it in semis if you're producing a a a chip. And, you know, the the process of producing a chip is you get to tape out and beyond. If you find a mistake, it's incredibly expensive to reverse. So you'll see it in in chip design. You'll see it in system software. You know, a lot of software, legacy software is written in languages like c, c plus plus. Mhmm. So, yeah, I I think you'll you'll start to see it in these systems languages, critical software, and then from there, it'll just as as the price goes down, I think it'll be ubiquitous.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That's exciting. I there's a lot of there's there's a lot of fear about the cybersecurity questions, I think it's it's great that the mathematical progress can actually apply even if it takes a couple reasoning steps, and I think people will need to digest it. And then they'll actually have to see it in the proof is in the pudding if we go through a whole period where we're like, wow. Yeah. There haven't been any incidents even though everyone's been through, you know, piling zero days of every system, but we're still in a good spot. Very exciting. White pill. There you go. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats to the Always been to chat. Cheers, guys. A great rest of your day. And we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. I have one last post I want to go through. Jordy, have you seen Spider Man No Way Home?

Speaker 2: Absolutely no. Not. Absolutely not. Should I? I think I I'm pretty into movies now. But we I saw were the Odyssey and I appreciate

Speaker 1: film. Movie? You're a film buff now. You're film star. Of a yeah. Honestly. No. There was a question on the timeline from Rob Felt rewatching. He was rewatching Spider Man No Way Home to prep for brand new day, the new Spider Man movie.

Speaker 2: And That is actually insane. What? Right as you said that Yes. A white spider landed from the ceiling onto my microphone. You see this? Yeah. I do. Wow. You said Spider Man. That's maybe you are the next Spider Man. Landed. I will try to show everyone.

Speaker 1: Yeah. You might need to turn down the the console. The put down your laptop. Swing it out more. Oh, it's really going around. Oh, it's on the ground now. Woah. There we go. Can you see this at all? I don't know if people can see this, but there is a spider crawling on Jordy's microphone. You'll have to really oh, there. Yeah. You can see it in the You'll have to handle in the monitor right there. You'll have to handle this. That's a very good omen. I think that's a good omen.

Speaker 2: Anyway Spiders can hear. Yeah. They can speak English.

Speaker 1: Let's Feel free to deal with that. I'm gonna talk about this. So in No Way Home, the movie, the prequel to Brand New Day, I think Homecoming is in this series, right? There's a whole series of new the latest round of Spider Man with Tom Holland, right? Is that it? Daily Bugle web show scene pops up, and all I can think about now is a question. Is the TBP N Aesthetic inspired by J. Jonah Jameson's web show? And if you look at it, it does sort of look like our show. And so it's a good question. Did we see this film? Did Jordy, who is the brand architect of the TBPN aesthetic, watch Spider Man No Way Home and say, ah, I like that color. I like that design. Let's bring that into our studio. And the answer, no. No. No. Lots of other influences, but this was actually not one of them. I believe I have green. Seen I like yeah. We like the color green. I remember Jordy one morning, we were working out, and he's like, we should do green. And I'm like, okay. Yeah. That sounds good. I like green. And he's like, no one's done green. And I'm like, that's not true. Like, Robinhood is green. There's plenty. He's like, no one in tech no one in tech has ever used green before. Green. I'm like, it is a white space in the sense that, like, yeah, I couldn't think of another podcast with the green dark green background. And we and we did find our own space. We we we looked at Pinterest a lot for different references, some photos, some catalogs. Ralph and Red look at Pinterest. What what what images were you pulling from? Because I know you had some references. I mean, obviously, f one, but just your brain? Just your brain. You don't let much go in there. But

Speaker 2: Certainly not movies. Certainly not movies. But I gotta figure out where this spider went. This spider landed. It was on the mic. I lost it. I think it's I think that's a good place to call Anyway, it is a coincidence, Rob. That's where it looks like. It is. Blue they're up almost 9% after that. Is is is way up. Yeah. NASDAQ is up 2.78%.

Speaker 1: Should've been in white suits. In white suits. But it's a very sad day because we love situational awareness, and they're going through a really moment. We're wishing them the best, hoping that, you know, good things come out of this ultimately. But, it was it didn't feel appropriate to wear a white suit on such a rough I'm in a black suit. He's in a black suit because it's a very disappointing moment. But, of course, everyone has a long career ahead of them, and there are many ways to build back better and do more big things in the future in the world of AI and technology. So thank you for watching TBPN. Tune in tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. That's right. Thanks for hanging out Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com, and we will see you tomorrow.

Speaker 3: Goodbye. King in the castle. King in the castle. Seven in on Wall Street. Money never sleeps. You shouldn't either. Call me back.