E242: How an 18-Year-Old Harvard Dropout Raised $47M

0:00You dropped out of Harvard at 18 years old. You've since raised$47 million for Dubb. What is Dubb? Dubb is the very first regulated copy trading platform. And very simply, instead of trading stocks in our app, we actually just copy what other people are doing. The whole thesis is that most retail investors will never get good at investing. Figures put at 70 to 90 % of retail investors underperform. They love the action of sort of trading. How do we channel that into a better way for better financial outcomes? There's no better thing than just following what proven experts are doing in the markets.

0:32If you take a big step back, it's actually nothing new what we're doing with copy trading. When you have money, you've got$50 million, you're not trading yourself. You're hiring a fancy wealth manager at Goldman Sachs. You're going to a hedge fund like Citadel. You're trusting the experts to deploy your capital. We want to enable anyone with$100 to do that same experience. Preparing for this interview, I did some research. I was shocked 20 % to 25 % of all trading in the market is retail. What are the confluence of factors leading to kind of such a large chunk of trading mean retail? Yeah, you're absolutely right.

1:01It's actually exploded over the past 10 to 15 years, probably doubled at least in terms of the retail trading volume. It's gone as high as like 35 % today in many estimates now, and it's only going to increase. And this is really the experience that I felt, the revolution of the retail investor, since really Robinhood ignited the wave with free investing. And over the past, I think, if you look at the 10 years, there are traders like me that grew up as kids who were sitting by a bunch of screens. Now we're able to invest for the very first time and streamline and open that brokerage account in 10 minutes.

1:31And that accessibility came to an explosion was one of the first parts. Right now, many more people could get access to trading. But two was really retail investing becoming part of the cultural zeitgeist. Think about what happened in 2020, 2021. Many estimates show 30 million new retail investors came online for the first time. And it wasn't about sitting by the screens anymore and looking at the fundamentals. It was about following people, ideas, and narratives to invest. We saw this in meme stocks. We saw this in crypto. Elon was moving the Dogecoin markets every tweet. And superstar fund managers like Cathie Woods, Bill Ackman, raising tens of not if not hundreds of billions of dollars in their funds.

2:10So, and I think that was just emblematic of really many ways, just social media, mobile era coming to investing. And that drove a lot of this ability to have these online communities with Wall Street Bets, Reddit, X, and everything that we've seen about social finance, the confluence of that. It's almost like this mimetic behavior. People were sitting around COVID with nothing to do, and they started trading almost like playing Warcraft or playing Halo. Absolutely. And that was me. That was the original inspiration for Dub. I was 19 years old. I was sitting in my dorm at Harvard, and we were part of the first COVID generation at school.

2:45So we're basically locked up in our dorms. You couldn't go to anyone else's room. So all I did was I was just trading. And I'd grown up doing a lot of trading. I started in second grade. But I got really serious during the COVID era where everyone was getting stimulus checks. Everyone had$1 ,000 to deploy in the market. And no one wanted to miss out on the Mimetic Desire and FOMO, where every single last person, your dumbest friend, was now making$100 ,000 in Dogecoin, right? Who's not going to give that a shot? It's hard to lose when there's so much money printing. Absolutely. And also, I think what people don't see about that narrative was in 2022, when the markets mean reverted, it crashed, the markets came down, and we had a couple years of sort of choppiness.

3:28That's where a lot of people lost money. GameStop, 80 % of people who invest in GameStop actually lost money in totality. But the only thing that people hear about is the run up. So this is part of Dub's mission is how do we get people not to just invest, but invest better? You dropped out of Harvard at 18. Hopefully your mother did not have a heart attack. But when did you know was the right time to drop out? And what did you need to see in order to do that? Yeah. So it was actually pretty lucky where my first time leaving or dropping out of school was in high school. So I left high school when I was 16 to do my first company.

4:02It's a virtual reality ed tech company that absolutely failed. It was called realism. But that was my school of hard knocks. I moved my two co-founders to Boston. We raised a little bit of venture capital. We lived in one bedroom and we all had like three air beds. And then I think after that experience, we were lucky. We sold the company. We had some patents pending. We had some good IP, but the business didn't work. That gave me the fortitude and the know-how of at least how to get started. So when this time came around and I saw this opportunity, I'm a product guy myself. and I was going to be the customer because I was participating in this wave.

4:33I was like, how do I get the ball rolling? And the first people I called were my previous investors from the company that I'd sold in the past. And they're like, blank check for you. No matter what, we're going to do whatever. So they de-risked it. They really did. And that gave me the confidence to go to the next step. And then I actually didn't even tell my mom when I decided to leave school to start this company because I'd already raised money and I was able to pay myself. I guess I was financially free. and I knew this is what I wanted to do. I think in many ways, also COVID school kind of sucked.

5:04So it was a natural path to go and build. And I sort of saw this consumer behavior wave that might come once in my lifetime with how retail investing was changing. And I wanted to seize the moment and go build something pretty incredible. A lot of people think that these kind of quitting college, like Mark Zuckerberg also quit after he had traction on Facebook. So a lot of people think he decided to quit and then he figured his way out. It's not necessarily binary. It's not like you have to quit and come up with an idea or never quit. It's about risk-adjusted decision-making. I was in the very fortunate place.

5:39Also 2021 was definitely one of the top peaks of the venture market. So, and it just happened that Robinhood IPO, Coinbase IPO, FinTech was the hottest thing on the market. So I also saw that and then wanted to seize the opportunity to go build something where there's true enterprise value being created and customer demand. And I think that's exhilarating for me to go work on too. And you can see the impact of what you're doing. How long did it take you to talk about your story that you're this 18, 19 year old? I'm sure there's some hesitation to kind of come out of the closet of being young and being such a young entrepreneur.

6:15The one thing that's unique about Silicon Valley is there are a couple of these stories now. So they really appreciate you more for your substance and your intellect and the logical outcomes of what you're doing rather than sort of the age. And part of it too was, I think, like, how do I de-risk that, right? In many ways, I knew building this business was going to require a lot of skills that I just never was able to accumulate or may never go have just because I haven't been in the industry for that long. Like, I don't know the first thing back then about compliance. I didn't know sort of all the regulatory regimes.

6:45I didn't have any of the licenses, right? It might take me years to go get those things done. So I hired a phenomenal chief compliance officer that's double my age, and now he covered that. A big part of building a business has been covering my weaknesses and really allowing myself to focus on the superpowers. And that applies to everyone. It's interesting because there's certain things that need to happen in every business. And every business kind of hits this roadblock. And sometimes it's not obvious what the founder should be doing and what the founder should be hiring for. Or sometimes the founder figures something out enough to know what to hire for.

7:18Walk me through as you scale. You've scaled out to millions of users. How do you solve those problems? How do you know when you should be doing something when a current team member or whether you should hire someone? It was a lot of fall on my face and screwing up. In the very beginning, I think one of the biggest lessons I learned was what got me here is not going to get me to where I want to go. And when I started the business and the way I grew up was like very individualistic. We were poor. I had very tough Asian parents. They're like very disciplined. You got to do everything followed by the book.

7:47And that's what I did. And I grew up in an environment of fear, but I was motivated by fear to go succeed. And I thought that was the right way to manage as well, because that's how my parents managed me. So when I first started the team, I was the worst micromanager. I was up in the weeds of sort of every single person. I thought everyone had to stay late until 8, 9 o 'clock. This is the startup grind. We got to live like how everyone else is. 996. 996. I still do it personally. I do 997, whatever. But I'm in a different boat. I've had the same issue. I think everybody should be hardcore, as Elon puts it.

8:20If you're too flexible on that, you end up having a mediocre culture. How do you balance this need for an extremely great culture with not being a psychopath? It's very difficult. And the one thing that I think has worked for me has been filtering and hiring for people that are innately bad. That will do it without me asking. I've realized the better way to lead and what's been working much better for me, or at least has been working for our team as I've recovered from these mistakes, has been motivating and leading not through fear, but inspiration, opportunity, and driving outcomes in the success of what we're doing.

8:54And when you can have the intrinsic motivation come out, that... There you go.

9:03Zoom background has made a lot of noise. It's kind of bigger. Sometimes that happens at the New York Stock Exchange. Sometimes, yeah. Wow. Good. Good. We're good. So double click on that. So you're looking for people with that kind of drive. Are many of your employees today kind of 996 or more realistically working until 7 or 8 or working in the evening after they come home? Yeah. And talk to me about the culture today. My policy now with the team is I don't inspect first. I expect greatness out of you. and I think when you are sat down and you're expected and your boss tells you I'm expecting really great things you're just naturally more motivated to go crush it and I don't actually care if you're in the office when you're working right I think like I when I hire you I'm giving you an immense amount of trust and I trust that you know your best work style your best work environment so if you got to go home for the rest of the day at like five or six o 'clock and you're just going to be better at home grinding for two or three more hours I completely no questions asked How do you determine whether you want someone that's going to work their ass off or somebody that's going to that has 20 years of experience doing this one thing and could literally check out at five o 'clock and be five times more effective than this person?

10:17I don't think it's binary. Some are best guys on our team. The older folks, my executive leadership team, they're maybe double my age, but they're still grinders. They might have kids. They're much older, but they just love staying in the game. Do you have any of those, though, that are just so good, they just come in for eight hours and they just crush? Or does that hurt your culture? It's not aligned with their culture. Yeah, I think especially it affects other people as well on the team. Yeah. And I don't think people who come in for eight hours and crush, they may be good at repeating their skill set and their experience.

10:48But to me, if they're just there for eight hours, they're not truly bought in. They're just checking in and checking out. Exactly. That's emblematic of some, I want people who love what we're doing, are students of the game, and care about being in the arena. And I try and viciously filter for that in my interviews now. And one thing that I was too scared to do in the past was anti-sell during my interviews. Of course, it's just selling the pitch of sort of getting someone in, inspiring them by the vision and the traction. But now it's like, hey, rank yourself on a scale of like 1 to 10. How gritty are you?

11:19If I talk to your former boss, would they say the same thing? Because at the end of the interview process, I'm going to get references. I'm going to talk to people who've worked with you in the past. And then I'm just straightforward. If that doesn't align with what we're doing, I don't want to set you up for failure to come into dub. So I think I've just gotten much more comfortable just being open and honest about this is our culture. This is the way that we operate. This is the way that you buy in. It's not going to be for everybody. What's the second order effects of anti-selling in this process?

11:47I usually do at the end. I think it hasn't been bad. It hasn't had any negative effects. I think it's been beneficial in the sense that it has helped us filter out people. And in the moment, they may not give you the answer that they think you want to hear. They'll probably give you an answer that you want to hear. But I think we have seen some folks drop out of the process because this just isn't for them. And that's actually what we want to have happen. So there's$100 trillion,$100 ,000 billion going from baby boomers to Gen Z and some younger millennials. How is that going to affect the marketplace, trading, dub, and my generation, Gen Z, the younger millennials?

12:24We live in a more polarized environment than we ever have in history, maybe sort of modern history. And part of that is we see in our politics, we see on the ground the wealth gap is growing faster than ever. And also this change in how people view wealth building. I'll give you a statistic. We just did a survey with the Harris Poll, a nationwide survey with thousands of U.S. Americans. and now the gen z majority of gen z believe that the fastest way to become a millionaire is um through investing and they want on average they want to become a millionaire by 32 years old through investing and that rises to 64 years old when it comes to baby boomers or the older folks that were queried i think this comes down to this this psychological shift where people are super risk on when it comes to the younger generation where all this money is going to go to and what they crave more than anything is the dopamine hit the agency having control over the decision making.

13:20And that's why we've seen risk assets like crypto options and all these things to have a mega boom over the past couple of years. It's reflective of the product that consumers demand, right? Not all that is going to be able to funnel into that, right? There's some things you can't move around, whatever trust structures and stuff like that. But if we think about what the next generation wants in terms of investing products, it's scary, right? Most retail investors don't know how to trade these effectively. They're very esoteric assets. The volatility is incredibly high. I think that's Dub's onus here is what I think I respect guys like Robinhood and the platforms that made investing free and opened it up.

13:57And that's been incredible for industry. It's increased the market share and market size drastically, but it's not enough, right? You're giving people the keys to the casino, but you're not teaching them how to play poker. And I think Dub's onus and the The next generation of companies is not just increasing access to investing, but how do you educate people to invest better? And that's not there. People are just going to continue losing money. That's the missing part of the equation. And that's what I'm afraid for during this great wall transition. If that's not there, I think we're set up for, in many ways, failure, protecting those assets well for the long term.

14:32Double click exactly on what do users go on Dub to do? Yeah. So when you sign into Dubb, you open a brokerage account like you would Robin. You were a brokerage dealer as well. But when you deposit money, you see sort of portfolios or these baskets of assets that you can invest in. And it's not single stock trading. You're investing in a portfolio strategy, essentially. It's kind of like you can think of it like investing in an ETF. The whole idea is that these portfolios are managed by people on the platform who have real track record. So today we have hundreds of these creators who are existing or former hedge fund managers, wealth advised RAs that have hundreds of millions of dollars of assets.

15:13These financial influencers of like 500 ,000 followers that you see on X who have been some of the most prolific traders that have engineered some of these retail sort of main stock movements over the past couple of years. And the whole idea is like, hey, with the tap of button, you can follow everything they do in their portfolio automatically. And of course, that's not going to guarantee better investment outcomes, right? But I do think on a probabilistic scale, when you're following someone who has a proven track record and you see their whole transparent trading history, it's probably on average better than trading yourself.

15:44Let's say you don't believe in alpha, which I believe in the mostly efficient market hypothesis. I do think there's some alpha. But let's say you don't even believe in that. There shouldn't be negative alpha. So if we just invest in all companies with the letter A or with the letter B, you shouldn't do that much worse than picking, quote unquote, picking. and I think what's important there is the agency that people feel on platforms like DUP. My mom will give me a call and she said, hey, I watched an interview with Alex Karp or Uber. Should I buy Palantir? Should I buy Uber? And I'm always like, do whatever you want because you can't really do wrong.

16:18The worst thing is actually not being in the market and not investing. If you just randomly pick stocks, you're actually doing pretty well. Yeah, 100%. And part of it is just simple. Which, by the way, is not the case for crypto or random meme coins, which sometimes there's like ruck bulls. It's not an efficient market. Right. It's not a nice match. Alpha is more important. The fund manager. I think you hit on a real key point for us is like part of it is even just simplifying investing. You need people more into investing, right? Like it's hard to learn which stock to pick. Just like your mom, like, what do I actually do when you trust a human being, which we're much more born to do that.

16:48We do that subconsciously. We understand humans. It's really the influencer economy in many ways coming to investing. And most of my product decisions today, I go on Yelp to decide what restaurant I go. I decide what I buy through this Instagram influencer. It's the same thing. For now, we're bringing it, this new behavior to how you deploy capital. And I think that just done well will onboard more people into investing, get them more comfortable, get them more familiar. If we do that, like the statistics right now is like 40 % to 50 % of Americans do not even own a single stock today. They're not participating in the greatest wealth creation engine of capitalism, the American dream.

17:23It's the ownership economy. And I think it's kind of scary to think that in AI, like we're going to be creating more market value than ever before. if a lot of americans aren't participating in that we're just going to perpetuate and even worse some people believe that truly the rate of inflation is higher than the cpi yeah and assets bubble up and income stay flat or or go up by a little bit so there's this increasing uh wealth gap between the rich those who own assets and those who don't yeah and i think that's if we can make investor simpler more familiar and bring more even a 10 debt in that i think uh we'll do so much change for the market.

17:58The thing that shocked me is like Amazon, when they IPO in 1970, since IPO to today, adjusted for all the stock splits, the stock is up 225 ,000 % with three zeros. Post IPO. Post IPO. Not as a private company. Not even as a private company. So that to me is like, if you draw that parallel to AI and the Mag7 has a very similar profile as that, everyone needs to participate in that. So that's why I'm really excited about some of the things that i see in the current administration where trump accounts right like whatever you want to label whatever you want to call it starting out every kid in the u.s with a thousand dollars in their bank account they're going to inevitably participate and the future american innovation and that is the one thing that i the more that we've grown and more that we've scaled i get more passionate about is how do we get everyone level the playing field of participation and what it means to be american and that's why we immigrated here as my parents came who's to have ownership yeah and that is the beauty that i think a lot of people forgotten with all the noise today i think if you bring it down to a neurobiological level so in our brain whenever we have a new activity a new neural pathway is formed negative and positive so smoking same thing that's why it becomes habitual but trading too and if you could get people just doing right action even in small dollars yep even in these esoteric traits which i want to get into yeah it's it's very pro-social for them and it completely changed the trajectory of their life.

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20:22And right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash how I invest. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash go slash how I invest. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Speaking of trades, tell me about how it could follow Nancy Pelosi's trades. It's a meme. I didn't know that you could actually operationalize that. So tell me about that. Yeah, absolutely. So Nancy Pelosi, the queen of investing, our favorite. By the Stock Act of 2012, every single sort of person in Congress needs to file any stock trades or their spouse's stock trades or the immediate family within 30 days, right?

21:05And this is part of the disclosures and they get fined if they don't. So Nancy Pelosi just happens to have made some really phenomenal trades over the past 20 years. And it's actually not her. It's her husband, Paul Pelosi, who is a – like, he's made a bunch of money as a VC, private equity investor. But their spouses, they talk pretty much every single day. Nancy's publicly denied. She's here to any information. But just can't. She's the Speaker of the House. She was, at one point, the most powerful woman probably alive, or at least within the U.S., right? On Dub, as of today, I checked today morning, she's been up since inception, which was I think in September of 2024 or 2023.

21:41She's up 188%. We made our customers tens of millions of dollars through copy trading Nancy Pelosi's picks. And yes, there's a 30-day lag. She's a 30-day window to follow our trades. But Nancy mostly does long-only stocks or leaps, sort of far out sort of options calls. So she doesn't trade too much. So she's been long-only, and she's been really long-only the top AI stocks, NVIDIA. And a couple esoteric ones, like some biotech stocks that absolutely popped. And now it's pretty cool because, like, you see whenever filing comes out, she moves the markets. And we see what's up. Now it reflects that not only does she have insider information, she's also moving the stock.

22:17Absolutely. Because there's so many people paying attention to what they're doing. And we've got enough capital platform where it kind of follows through now. Yeah. But I do want to highlight that Nancy Pelosi, she's viral. She's famous. Yes, she's made a lot of money. But who knows if the alpha will continue. should not retire soon. But it's only one of hundreds of different investing strategies that you can now copy trade on the platform. And I think the vision has been like, hey, we got a lot of early success because we leaned on the viral distribution, the viral content policy, and we did make a lot of money.

22:47But now it's like, how do we build this entire marketplace of investing strategies across asset classes, across discretionary, quantitative strategies, and really bring on the best talented managers or creators or traders, the platform to deliver alpha for our customers. They're kind of like creating a mini Citadel where you give people money or they come in with a track record. They're able to raise some money and prove themselves in the market. And then the good ones get promoted with more capital and the bad ones basically get fired. 100 % we're a meritocratist marketplace, right? With Citadel and Ken Griffin, I guess it's controlled essentially, but NAPM can plug into this phenomenal system and infrastructure that they built, data, systems, trading, risk management, And Ken gives you the money and then you go trade and they've got hundreds of portfolio managers and they scale that system up.

23:35We're dubbed the same thing. We've got hundreds of creators or traders now on the platform. Their money is not coming from me, but from our customers, our retail investors, maybe$100, but you multiply$100 over a million. That's a lot of money and it's a substantive sort of move in the market. So it's a lot of assets. And then we give them the execution or the brokerage. We give them the data. We give them the tools. And then we also give them, I think, the most important piece, which is visibility and distribution. The moment you come on to Dubb, if you make it onto our leaderboard, we're putting you in front of millions of eyeballs.