Vlad Tenev (Part 2)

31:16So typically, under normal circumstances, people are buying and selling, so you kind of end up being flat. But in this situation, when something's going up and all the retail are pretty much buying. It was very one-sided. These rules reared their ugly head and basically made our deposit requirements balloon. They went from sub 100 million a couple of days before GameStop to in the billions within a span of something like 24 hours. And then how did all this play out, I was sleeping. And at this point, I was trying this thing. So you can imagine the depths of COVID. I was just online all the time, probably working 20 hours a day.

32:07My laptop was usually next to my bed. And I was kind of going a little loony. So I was trying this thing where I slept with my phone in another room because I just thought this is bad for my mental health. I need some kind of reset. And my folks on the East Coast who were doing like the morning open preparations were trying to get a hold of me. And eventually they call my wife. My wife does sleep with her phone next to her. So they find out how to get to her. She wakes me up and she is obviously perturbed by this whole situation to begin with because nobody ever calls her. Like shit hasn't hit the fan to that degree.

32:52She's like, oh my God, oh my God, Vlad, there's something going on. I can't really understand it. Yeah, but they need you. They need you. So I go, I pick up my phone. My phone is unusable. It's like, I don't know if you've ever seen these clips of Kim Kardashian getting like having her notifications on and posting an Instagram post. And then you see all the notifications just churning from the millions of followers. It was kind of like that, right? The phone was unusable from text messages and calls. And I would have these messages like, what the fuck are you doing? How could you side with them?

33:29Wow. Yeah, it was just people were upset. They thought that we were siding with the hedge funds and we were colluding with them in some way. Who decided to shut it down for that 12 hours? It was the president of the brokerage of the clearing firm. And part of this is just we have a bunch of businesses and they have presidents. And, of course, you know, the presidents are responsible for all the regulatory matters and running the business. So this one, the president, you know, made the call. And it was a tough call for a variety of reasons, right? Because you can kind of think of the counterfactuals, what would have happened.

34:06And there's some scary stuff that happens. Lehman Brothers shut down. They had to liquidate. And these rules around capital requirements, they're not optional. So they can come in and shut you down. And you saw FTX a couple of years later, just when the survival of the firm is in question, I think the most important thing turns out to be you have to protect all the people's money, right? And kind of became a question of, all right, there's a lot of people on the platform that aren't trading GameStop. And there's some people that are trading GameStop for sure, and they're upset, but. Was the whole system turned off or just GameStop trading?

34:46It was GameStop, but also a bunch of the other meme stocks. I see. There were a handful of others, AMC. And then I wake up and I'm hearing the story of basically Sheets came in and a lot of this was automated. You can think of this as like a tax bill coming in with$3 billion. Yeah. And then we can't get on the phone with anyone to explain it to us. And then another one comes in and it's lower,$1.7 billion. So was it not clear to you what was going on at the time? It was not clear. My first thought was actually maybe the central clearing system has some issue. Maybe they're just sometimes when things are overloaded, just bogus numbers are being sent out.

35:34And then there was just this latent fear of if it's$3 billion today, and let's say we managed to come up with this money, and we did. knock on wood, right? We came up with it. What if it just keeps going? Could it be 50 billion tomorrow? Because the day before it was a hundred million. Yeah. It had gone up by over an order of magnitude. So yeah, we made the tough call to, the president made the tough call to shut it down. And then what we did was we went out, we broke up into a couple of work streams. We had the engineering one, making sure the systems were stable. Then we spun up a money raising one of we don't know exactly how much money we need, but it's pretty clear we need some more money because we don't know what's going to happen in the future.

36:21And then there was the public relations one of, okay, I figured out how to make some calls and get through my phone, but the Robinhood brand and what we stood for was kind of under attack. So we had to like communicate. And at the time, the story was that we were colluding with the hedge funds. There was a narrative that the White House had called me to shut down GameStop trading. And so there was this fake collusion narrative that we felt like we had to dispel. Nobody knew about this deposit requirements thing. And if you think about it, it's very technical and hard to explain and less compelling as a narrative than Robinhood is turning their back on the poor siding with the rich and taking the poor's money.

37:11Hedge fund Conclusion, simple, delightful narrative. This like clearing house market plumbing thing, very hard to understand. Were you able to solve that the next day when it got turned back on? No. We thought we would be. Yeah. Yeah. And from my perspective, you could imagine, fresh in my mind was the full platform outage of March of the past year. And I was kind of like, what's the big deal here? At least we didn't shut down the platform. To some degree, I was like, wow, the engineering held up and we were able to serve all the buy and hold customers. But no, you know, once this collusion narrative took off, it was like wildfire.

37:51I see. And I gave some very bad press interviews. Yeah. And my instinct was, look at all this noise on social media. We have to get out there right away. We have to communicate with the customers. We have to tell people we're not colluding. And so the first messages were like highly scrubbed, generic legalese messages. Like, we did not do this at the direction of any other market participant or market center, or we didn't want to say Citadel or hedge funds or anything. So there was these generic things. And then, of course, the reaction was, of course, they're colluding. Look at this shit. They sound just like what someone colluding and doing some stuff would say.

38:33Hostage videos. Exactly. Yeah, they're telling us they're not colluding. So obviously they're colluding. And then I did these interviews with the press, with Andrew Ross Sorkin, where I just kind of had my talking points and I was reading them. Were you scared? I mean, I wasn't scared. I was actually like, I want to go out there. This is my time to lead, you know? Yeah, yeah. This is my time to show what I'm made of as a leader. because I'd been kind of a reclusive, not reclusive, but I hadn't really been out there very much, kind of just building behind a keyboard and not doing a lot of talking.

39:11So I wanted to go out there. And actually, after the interviews finished, I ended up thinking, like, I thought that went pretty well, you know, felt like I got my points across. I read them, you know, throughout the years since then. I keep thinking, was there some magic collection of words that I could have said or interview I could have given that would have taken the temperature down and would have solved that issue and helped the brand out? Because it's been a gradual rebuild in the years since then of the brand and the public perception around that. Largely, it's just time has healed the wounds.

39:54People kind of move on. But yeah, I still play that back. If those interviews had gone better and I'd given like a super charismatic response and said, hey, this was a really bad situation. We weren't ready for it. We didn't have$3 billion at the time. We didn't really know. But yeah, I'm not sure. Probably to some degree, maybe it could have helped 20%. I don't know if those magic words existed. I think we were just in a really tough spot. I think the moment I picked up my phone and it was just buzzing with all the hate texts, it was probably too late to do much about it. Do you feel like now it's completely in the past and the brand has recovered?

40:37I think the brand recovered. There's still people that bring it up for sure, though. How many years ago was it? Five years ago. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not completely gone. We look at this thing called net promoter score. What's that? So it's basically a measure of product loyalty. You ask people how likely are you recommend something or there's another version of it. Like if this product disappeared today, how unhappy would you be? And if they say eight out of 10, nine out of 10, or 10 out of 10, they're considered a promoter and they're like a hundred points. If it's six or under, they're a detractor.

41:18And if it's seven or eight, they're neutral. So it's a little bit of a contrived measure, but directionally it's pretty useful. And so NPS of a hundred, everyone loves you. NPS of negative a hundred, everyone hates you. NPS of zero, you've got as many promoters and detractors. So ours plummeted on that day. What was it before? Do you remember? It was pretty high. I don't know if we've ever shared it, but I mean, it was up there with some of the best companies and it actually yeah i mean it crashed it crashed yeah and so we were able to measure this old adage that trust is slowly earned but can be lost very very quickly we saw that in the number it just went down yeah and then it took many years probably three years 2024 was when it It got back to like pre-GameStop levels.

42:12And it was a combination of, I think, GameStop decreasing in importance and us improving the rest of it. But yeah, even today you see some people that mention it. You didn't make any mistakes. You were asleep. Well. There was no way you could have even been thinking that this is something that could happen. No. I mean, yeah, of course you could second guess and you could say, should we have been better prepared? prepared for what? Prepared for an earthquake or prepared for a fire? How can you be prepared for any possible event? Yeah, I did think by and large, we were in firefighter mode from the beginning and it was sort of like, okay, this thing happened.

42:58Let's clean it up. I think a lot of the armchair quarterbacks were like, well, they should have been better prepared, should have been capitalized with a lot of money. I was very happy that our system stayed up from an engineering standpoint. That was the known risk. But yeah, if I had to look back, I think my interviews left something to be desired. It was funny. Like I did my press. Everyone was watching those interviews. I did one with Andrew Cuomo on CNN, who I followed a lot during COVID because he did like all these COVID commentary and that one's viewed millions of times. And yeah, when I look at it, it's not very confidence inspiring.

43:35You know, I could have done a little better on the communication. But it was also the first time you were ever in that position. It's like trial by fire, right? Yeah. And then I did a clubhouse with Elon Musk, which Elon Musk interviewed me. Great. About what happened with GameStop. And I think that one went better. Yeah. Because that's the one where I shared the details, the$3 billion capital call, the NSCC, the DTCC, all the players. And yeah, but that happened on Sunday. And I think what happened really was the whole thing was over by Sunday because the market closed on Friday. And then there was the weekend and the story shifted.

44:19And I think people lost interest. So what actually ended up i think there are some people that blame robin hood for ending the whole gamestop thing but i think the reality is it probably would have ended anyway and what really ended it was the weekend and these types of things these like short squeezes they're pretty episodic and usually if something like spikes up a lot it doesn't end up at like a permanent plateau of high price throughout history, a big spike up, usually followed by a big crash. Especially considering it wasn't based on the quality of the GameStop business. It wasn't Tesla shipping their new model.

45:07It wasn't that. Yeah, I think certainly people criticize the fundamentals of it. And I think we got some blame for both sides, right? We got blamed from the GameStop traders, the retail army, for doing the position-closing-only trades. And then also from the people that weren't doing it that were like, oh, Robinhood facilitates this GameStop stuff and we don't like that. So you can imagine we were sort of sandwiched by both sides. And when I went to testify in front of Congress, it was like very, very stark. and it was mostly from the people that didn't believe that the GameStop activity was healthy market activity.

45:47And they were just asking us about, is your platform responsible for the whole thing to begin with? Yeah. It's like, did you instigate it? Yeah. And I was like, well, it was all over the news. It was all on social media. The trading didn't originate. Like the roaring kitty was using E-Trade. But everyone, I think what I realized is when something like this happens, people look for someone to blame. And I think, unfortunately, and through lack of savvy, we kind of became the scapegoat. Tell me about your note-taking habits. Yeah, this is something that I started kind of recently, and I am not as regular as I should be.

46:31But every night I kind of like to wind down and just take notes about my day, just kind of like what's going through my mind, what bothers me. And then I also like to look ahead to tomorrow and just think of like the top three things that I need to get done. Usually the list is like 10 or 15, but I really focus on the top three. Do you think of it as journaling? Yeah, but it's actually, it's a little bit more, it always rears into. To-do lists. To-do lists a little bit. Yeah. So it's kind of like half journaling, half to-do lists. But I also try to do, like on Sunday, I'll do it for the week. At the beginning of the month, I'll do it for the whole month.

47:23and then I'll also do it for the year. So it's kind of like December, end of December, if I'm at home, I'll just think through my year and what I want the year to be. And I kind of say, all right, if it's December 29th, 2016 and I'm kind of looking back and what would it take me to feel good about what just happened? Do you ever look back? Yeah. You do? Yeah. Great. I look back. Yeah, and that's actually some of the most fun stuff. And I noticed, wow, I'm thinking about a lot of the same things. Yeah. Yeah, basically I'm thinking about half the things that I was thinking about a year ago. So those are kind of unresolved and maybe that tells me something.

48:07And then there's just a whole bunch of new stuff. When you're thinking about a new idea, do you write about it? That's changed a little bit. A lot of my ideas that I have are software ideas. Like there's this new product or new feature, new piece of software that I could build. Lately, I've just been building them. Oh, great. And that's been kind of fun. Yeah, or I go on my chalkboard and I sketch stuff out. That's like if I really want to get my hands dirty and feel it. Yeah. Do you build stuff coding in a traditional way or vibe coding? Vibe coding. I think now it's just... That's coding now.

48:48Now that's coding, yeah. I remember when I first started coding, yeah, it always blew my mind how the vast majority of software engineers didn't really know the internals of the systems. Like, they didn't learn assembly language or memory management or pointers. And I think there's two ways to look at it, right? Some people would say, well, that's a great thing because it democratized coding. You didn't have to, a lot of people don't want to deal with all that stuff. They get bored of it. And so it opened up coding to a lot more people. But I always thought you have to really understand all the stuff to really know what you're doing and to get the most out of it.

49:28I think now you're seeing it again. So I still think it's important to understand what the code does and how it works. But the vast majority of people that are coding now probably didn't code a year ago. Yeah. You know about the other business I started, right? No, tell me. I was a mathematician or an aspiring mathematician. So a couple of years ago, I found another company. You have a PhD in math. You're not an aspiring mathematician. Well, I dropped out. So I just left with my master's after one year. Yeah, so basically, Harmonic's goal is to build what we call mathematical superintelligence, which is an AI that can solve math problems at a superhuman level.

50:12How is that different than what an LLM does? Well, LLMs can certainly solve math problems. But when we started this, which was 2023, they made mistakes with addition, right? They would just add things and subtract things. I read an article last week about that. It's not solved. No, no, it still happens. But you could see a lot of the ingredients being there, like the substrate existing for creating AI that's superhuman at solving mathematics. But it's just it wasn't there at the time. It's still not quite there. I think we're Harmonic, which is the company as a product called Aristotle. Aristotle is very much at the frontier.

50:57And the big thing that is getting in the way, the big obstacle that we have to solve is the hallucinations. So you can imagine if you're writing a history essay or just doing research, hallucinations are not that big of a deal. I mean, annoying, but you can generally, one hallucination, one mistake doesn't destroy the entire argument. But if you have a complex mathematical theorem or something that you need to prove, it could be thousands of steps. And a hallucination in one of the steps essentially invalidates the whole thing. So the whole thing is just garbage. So in order to solve mathematical superintelligence, you have to solve this hallucination problem and make sure that every step of reasoning is logically sound and follows from the axioms.

51:52and that you can trust the conclusions. And if you do that, you solve this like subtraction being wrong problem. Isn't that the case though with AI writing code? It's 100 % the case with AI writing code. These things are very, very connected. So the issue with vibe coding is that you just create a lot of slop code. You can think of this mountain of code, right? And you just, anytime you send another message saying, okay, add this feature, fix this bug, oh, this thing screwed up, the code just increases, which I think works in some cases, but it creates this problem and changes the job of the software engineer from someone writing the code to someone like trimming this bonsai tree or like dealing with this conflagration of nonsense and clamping it down.

52:48So there is a problem with vibe coding too, which is there's just hallucinations that you also have to solve. And I think the bet that we're making with mathematical superintelligence with Aristotle is that these things actually have the same solution. And that solution is something called formal verification. So what formal verification is, basically, you write a spec. The spec is essentially you can think of as the list of properties and rules that your system has to follow. And then you formally and mathematically prove that any code that you generate follows these rules. And now formal verification existed before AI.

53:35The French have deployed it in a lot of places, like the Paris train stations are formally verified. and you can mathematically prove that the trains aren't going to hit each other. And I think there's something like 30 years with no accidents. But these are humans hand crafting, very artisanal work of just making sure that all of the mathematical properties are proved by hand. So the bet that we're making is there's actually going to be a new paradigm of vibe coding and vibe proving where it's not just like the Wild West, but things are constrained by these theorems that you have to follow. And if I think about harmonic, the sort of like North Star goal is to solve a Millennium Prize worthy problem.

54:26So like one of the big problems of mathematics. And I think that with a fairly high degree of confidence, these don't get solved very often. The last one was about 20 years ago by this Russian guy, Grigori Perelman. He solved the Poincaré conjecture. I think the next one very likely will be either significant AI assist or maybe even largely solved by AI. So that's kind of the long-term goal. But of course, we have to break that down into shorter-term goals. And the first accomplishment we had was to get a gold medal or gold medal level performance at the International Math Olympiad, which is like the most prestigious math competition, but sort of high school level problems, still highly creative.

55:13These are smart high schoolers. I never even went to the IMO as an aspiring mathematician. I was sort of like three rungs below it. So I think even that was a big accomplishment. But then we went from that to solving small, unsolved research-level problems. I think now we're getting to the point where we're used to solve and formalize more meaningful results that people actually have tried to solve by hand, but couldn't, not because of lack of attention, but because they're just hard. So I think there's this rising capability that I think will culminate into true research level math results. That's really exciting.

55:55Yeah, vibe proving, I call it. The fun thing is like you have these Erdős problems. Have you heard of Paul Erdős? Yeah, there's actually this picture of Terry Tao when he was a child. I think he was seven years old, sitting with an old Paul Erdős, I think who was probably in his 70s or 80s at that time. He was a Hungarian mathematician. He was kind of a traveling mathematician. So he would go and stay at people's houses. He would just come up with his suitcase and be like, I'm going to stay with you for two weeks. What are you working on? I'll help you with whatever math you're working on. I think he was like hopped up on amphetamines the whole time.

56:35You'd travel the world, stay in people's houses. And so he became the most prolific mathematician. Yeah, there's actually an Erdős number, kind of like the Bacon number, which is how many degrees away are you from Kevin Bacon, right? Kevin Bacon's zero. If you're in a movie with Kevin Bacon, you're one. If you're in a movie with someone that was in a movie with Kevin Bacon, you're two. So there's an Erdős number as well. Yeah. Paul Erdős is zero. If you've published a paper with him, it's one. There's also an Erdős bacon number, which is you add the two. And there's actually someone with, I think, an Erdős bacon number of two.

57:14So someone from Goodwill Hunting who had co-authored a paper with Paul Erdős. So anyway, this guy, during his whole lifetime, there's like 1 ,100 Erdős problems that have been collected, half of them unsolved. And, you know, people collect them. Now there's a library of them. So now Aristotle's being used to solve and formalize all of them. And they're just, they're dropping like flies. That's great. Like every week you have. And sometimes it's by amateurs. It's someone who's not a mathematician, but they're essentially vibe proving. Like they're an AI savvy student and they're just making contributions to the field.

57:55And that would have been inconceivable five years ago. That's amazing. Yeah. Like both because it's hard, but mostly because you have all these like crank amateur mathematicians that are like, I've proved this big theorem, but nobody's even going to pay attention to it. Right. Because to get a mathematician to like concentrate and most of the time there's some mistake, but you have to like really concentrate to find it. But what formal verification results in is the machine can check the proof. Yeah. So you don't have to convince anyone. If it compiles, it's guaranteed to be accurate. That's great.

58:31I gave a TED Talk about the future of AI. Okay, and there's a lot of doomerism out there where people think nobody's going to have any jobs because the AI models are going to do everything that we can do. But they'll do it a thousand times faster and better. I'm probably a little bit more optimistic for a couple of reasons. One is that there's so many of these things that we don't understand. Like, we don't understand what's going on with the fundamental fabric of reality, which you can see with simple things like the double-slit experiment. We don't know what happened at the beginning of the universe.

59:13We don't understand what happens with out-of-body experiences. So that tells me with a fairly high degree of confidence that there's some aspects of what we consider intelligence that are quite possibly outside of your own brain. It's probably not that, hey, if you understand just how the brain works and image it and duplicate it and copy it and move it into the cloud, that you can replicate what's going on here. which makes me think, well, there's probably some aspect of our intelligence that can't be replicated by just AI models getting better and better and faster and faster. I think you also see it, you know, AI capability is growing, but it's not like clearly overshooting human capability.

1:00:03It's like we saw a big jump from generation three of the Transformers to generation four, But then it's kind of like at some level where it's always questionable whether it's smarter than humans or not. It's like converging to some level of ambiguity of whether it's like much better than us or not. Rather than just it shooting far ahead and becoming incomprehensible. And then also the fact that, well, if you look at our jobs and what we do, probably 50 years ago, they would have looked at what we do and thought that we were just having fun. We're not doing real work. We're not in a factory. We're not doing manual labor.

1:00:44So probably we would conform to our ancestors' idea of technological unemployment. They would say, oh, these people aren't working. They're having meetings all day. They're on Zoom calls. They're managing companies. So yeah, I think I'm a little bit more optimistic in that sense. I don't think that we're likely to see a big AI doom and gloom scenario. Do you think that the influence of your parents being involved in finance impacted you? Yeah, maybe in a roundabout way. When I was growing up, I was really interested in math and physics and sciences. and for a while I just didn't really think or care about doing anything commercial in nature, right?

1:01:31I just wanted to make discoveries and do cool stuff. And my impression growing up was my parents were very like professional, stable existence. It was really about having comfortable benefits, being able to provide a good life for me. It was sort of like they took this giant risk in moving the entire family to the U.S. and it was really all about stability. You know, I think I was rebelling against that a little bit and I just really wanted to be a scientist or a mathematician or some kind of inventor. That was what I kind of gravitated toward. Do you live in the Bay Area now, no? Yeah. How long has it been?

1:02:22A while. Yeah, I mean. Before the company? Before. So I moved around quite a bit. I have lived in LA as well, but I was born in Eastern Europe and then moved with my parents to the East Coast of the US. And then I went to Stanford. You were five, I think? Yeah. Do you remember life before at all? Yeah, for sure. Really? Yeah, I mean, I don't always remember like, oh, when I was three, this happened, or when I was four. But you remember the general feeling of it. Yeah, because it was just a very big discontinuity, right? So I can basically say, okay, well, this was all the stuff before I moved to the U.S., and this was all the stuff after.

1:03:03And it was so different that, you know, that bucketing makes it very easy to bucket my memories. Why did your parents decide to move? You know, at around that time, this was in the early 90s, there was a huge transition in Eastern Europe. Basically, the Berlin Wall fell. You saw the Iron Curtain lifted. Yeah. And the late 80s in Bulgaria was a time of crazy optimism. Bulgaria was doing very, very well. Population was growing. People had a pretty good standard of living. We were winning Olympic gold medals. So everything by all measures was really good. But my grandfather, I remember when he was still alive, he'd tell me the stories like, I think this empire is going to collapse being the Soviet Union and all the satellite states.

1:03:57So he kind of pushed my dad to strongly consider coming to America. And then an opportunity came up. So right after the Iron Curtain lifted and people from outside Bulgaria were allowed to come in to the country, this group of folks from the University of Delaware came to visit. And my dad was a professor at the time at the Economic University of Varna. Varna is like the summer capital, they call it in Bulgaria. It's on the beach, so it's kind of nice. The biggest industry is tourism. What was his subject? He studied tourism. He was a professor of tourism? He was a professor of tourism. Is there such a thing?

1:04:46I mean, it was the biggest booming sector, so. Wow, I've never heard that before. Yeah, he was a professor of tourism, and he had a business on the side, which was essentially a tourism business. So he was an entrepreneur too, where they would basically take the French tourists. There was an influx of people from France that were visiting Bulgaria. And they had all these buses and they would take them around the country. Which was funny because I went with my wife last time I was in Bulgaria was 2016. And my parents came with us. My dad was like, I remember when I would take the tourists and I would take them around.

1:05:20And he took us through all these back alleys in some of the cities. Do you think your dad still thinks of that as home? I think so. Yeah. So he was 31 when he came over to the U.S. So, you know, his formative years, all of his friends from high school, you know, they're all still in Bulgaria. So when he goes back, that's when he's hanging out with people, staying up late at night. You know, in America, I think it's really just the family and, you know, he's got a couple of friends from work. But Bulgaria, I think he still thinks of as home. So these folks from University of Delaware came. They were impressed by my father because at the time in Bulgaria, if you were a professor of economics, there was a lot of pressure institutionally to teach like Marxist theories, like Adam Smith, free markets.

1:06:14those were all taboo. So they had all of the Western literature locked up in the basement. It was like banned literature. And my dad would tell me the story about how he would sort of like sweet talk the librarian essentially, and she would let him go down there and he would read all this stuff and it would make its way into his thesis. But his thesis was about a taboo subject. and so they made it hard for him to actually defend his dissertation and finish. So they were kind of holding it up. But then everything shifted, right? And when these folks from University of Delaware came, that weakness was like his biggest strength.

1:07:00They were like, okay, well, there's people here that actually aren't Marxists and who understand this stuff. And so he got an opportunity to get a scholarship to do a master's at University of Delaware. That was 1991. He moved over there. And he had to go by himself because he wasn't sure whether we had a future in the country, you know. And then my mom came about a year later. And then I came about six months after her in summer of 1992. Basically, I finished kindergarten in Bulgaria. I stayed with my grandparents. But yeah. What do you remember about your first trip? That was my first trip out of the country, the first trip on a plane.

1:07:40Yeah. And I remember, you know, one of my memories was like my weekly phone call with my dad. Because back then, of course, it was very expensive to call between U.S. and Bulgaria. So it was once a week for basically 10 minutes we would get on the phone. And how long hadn't you seen him? A year and a half. There's still pictures of me from when I landed at JFK. My parents took these pictures of me. And I remember my aunt brought me over. She was like a punk rock teenager at the time. She was like 17 years old. And I was shy to like see my parents. I was like hiding behind her and kind of peeking out because I'd basically forgotten them, you know?

1:08:20Yeah. Did you go into New York? Went into New York. How different was that than anything you'd seen before? That blew my mind. Yeah, that blew my mind. Just like I'd never seen. Did you speak any English? No English, no. And they dropped me into school right away. So it's like, here's kindergarten, right? I did kindergarten again in the U.S. And it was just no English. So I had to kind of learn it from scratch, basically. Would you say you learned it more from watching television, movies, or from speaking to people? Speaking to people because we didn't have television. Really? Yeah. My parents got a television.

1:08:59I remember it was about six months after we moved for the second time. First, we were in Delaware. Then we moved to College Park, Maryland. And my dad continued with the studies. He got a PhD, his second PhD at University of Maryland. And our first TV, which was six months after we moved in there, someone had thrown out this like shitty black and white TV. It was probably from like the 60s or 70s. you know, those TVs with the two knobs. The big knob was like, it changes channels by the tens. And then there was the little knob, which was missing that lets you change channel by the ones. Then we figured out, okay, if you get a wrench, you can just like kind of adjust it and get to channel five or something.

1:09:44And of course, no cable. We couldn't really afford that. So. Was it frustrating not being able to talk to people? What was that experience like? Yeah, so kindergarten, I think it was pretty frustrating. I found in an old briefcase when I visited my parents in D.C. a couple months ago, there was my old report card from kindergarten, right, where the teacher writes notes. And I remember January of 1993, Vladimir is adjusting to kindergarten. He's adjusting to the new school. He's not talking to the other children yet, but he's at least not crying and he enjoys playing with these toys and drawing or whatnot.

1:10:26And that made me kind of sad. It's like, oh, I wasn't talking to the other children for probably four or five months. Yeah. But yeah, I remember being frustrated because I wanted to play with a certain thing or a toy, and I didn't know how to express that to the teacher. And she wouldn't understand me when I tried. That was probably my memory from kindergarten. And just seeing all the different types of kids. It was very cosmopolitan. People from University of Maryland would send their kids to the schools, like the local school. So it was just smart kids, right? Professors, kids, grad students, postdocs.

1:11:04So that kind of blew my mind and that was really cool. How do you think English being your second language and being thrown into it that way impacted your life? Is that one of the pieces of why you are who you are? I think absolutely. I think about it now in the context of having my own children, right? I have three kids who are roughly that age. You know, I have an eight-year-old, a seven-year-old, and a three-year-old. So right around this time period. And they have everything, right? They can get the best tutors, got a chess teacher, someone teaching them piano. Yeah, when I was that age, my parents were, they each had two jobs.

1:11:51So I basically, they would drop me off at the bus stop in the morning. I would come back from school at 3 p.m. I'd have to walk back as a five-year-old from the bus stop to my apartment. At first, my parents would say, okay, go to the, our neighbor upstairs has your key. So just go and she'll give you the key and let you in and whatnot and make sure you're all right. Then they realized, well, we're asking a lot of this kid. He's just already walking a mile from the bus stop and everything and navigating all this complex logistics. We might as well just have him keep the key in his backpack. So I'd let myself in, do my homework, call my mom to check in.

1:12:31And then if I finished my homework, I could go play outside with my friends. And then my parents would come back at 8 p.m., sometimes 8.30. We'd have dinner together and I would go to sleep. And then my dad usually would be working late into the night anyway. So I kind of just saw him on weekends. Yeah. So it probably made it okay for you to be by yourself and good work ethic. A lot of time by myself. There was always this like threat that my parents would not be able to pay for my college. So I'd better get a scholarship because finances were always tight. And there was always this subtle threat that our status in the country was not very secure because we were just like student visa holders, right?

1:13:18And we could go back to Bulgaria at any moment. Did you look back on Bulgaria as I'm glad I got out of there or no? No, because, well, I did like America, but I didn't necessarily fear it. I loved my grandparents. I didn't particularly love school. I think I enjoyed school in America much more. What was different about that? You know, I just kept moving between different schools. I had like this one school when my parents were there. And then when I moved with my grandparents, I went to a second one and then I had to go to a third one. So I just remember moving schools and never really being able to settle in and have a group of friends.

1:14:01In the U.S., oddly enough, first grade, I started making friends. At the beginning of the year, my English was pretty weak, pretty rudimentary. But by the end of the year, I was actually like in advanced English, right? So I had kind of like I started taking English and math with the people from higher grades. And I had my group of friends. And then I stayed in that school for four years. So it was like kindergarten through third grade, which at that time was the longest I'd been at a place. So the longer it went, the more acutely I felt that I didn't really want to go back to Bulgaria, the more settled and kind of American I felt.

1:14:48And then I remember my parents, 1996 was when they started doing a little bit better. My dad had finished his PhD. He had gotten a full-time job at the World Bank. What was he doing at the World Bank? At first, he was a consultant, but then he became an economist. And then he paid for my mom to get her MBA at Georgetown. And then she joined the World Bank as well. So they worked there together for their entire career, you know, 25 years plus for my dad. How much do you know about the World Bank? I know a little bit about it. Tell me what you know. I know very little about it. Is it private? Technically private.

1:15:31So the different countries own shares in the World Bank group. At least this is how it is for the IFC, the International Finance Corporation, which is part of the World Bank group. It's like the IFC, IMF, and then the World Bank itself. And then there's another one called MIGA. I forget what it stands for. Is the World Bank in competition with other banks or it's sort of different than other banks? It's kind of different than other banks. So the shareholders are countries. And my understanding of it at least is, so the IFC you can think of as kind of a venture capital firm. So they make investments in private enterprise in emerging.

1:16:16On behalf of governments. On behalf of their shareholders, yeah, which tend to be governments. Is it only governments or can other people invest with them? I don't think others can invest. So it's only governments. Yeah, I think it's only governments. So yeah, you can think of it as a venture capital firm. So my mom's job was to go and underwrite investments in, it would be like a chemical plant or a fertilizer company, or she did a university at one point. And they invest for a return. but different than a typical venture capital structure because there's really no carry that accrues to the partners.

1:16:58I think all of it goes to the shareholders, which are the countries. And then there's the IMF, which sort of like provides monetary assistance to countries, not to private enterprise. So, you know, if there's a currency crisis, the IMF can step in and actually provide assistance to stabilize it. But yeah, my impression of it, big company. I would go with my parents to work when I was a kid, and I just loved that they had the fast internet. So that's kind of where I figured out how to use the internet and play computer games. I didn't take a particular interest in what they were actually doing, but I loved being able to use the internet and use computers at their work.

1:17:46That was the first time I kind of discovered that stuff. What decisions have you made over the years that were considered questionable by experienced people around you but turned out well? A lot of the consequential decisions, I think, in Robin Hood's history, Launching with zero commissions. A big criticism or question we would get early on is, well, why not some commission? How about like$3 or 99 cents? You know, why does it have to be zero? Doing the credit card with 3 % cash back, that was risky. Doing crypto as a regulated financial firm. I mean, that's like you're going into the fog at that point in 2017.

1:18:30Crypto was not an accepted asset. It's dangerous. is dangerous. Prediction markets recently, big one. The big criticism we get now is, how is it not sports betting? Does sports betting belong next to your retirement account? If I had to sum it up. Yeah. I think that in some ways it's gotten easier over time. I think making some decisions and having some proof points that they work out, even if people doubt them. Yeah. That kind of like builds up my bank of credibility and then, you know, I can lose that. Some of it fluctuates with the stock price too. I notice when the stock is doing well, people get a little bit more, not deferential, but I think I earn a little bit more respect even though it's a little silly to have that be tied to the stock price.

1:19:24Do you bet on prediction markets or do you use it more for ground truth understanding? I use it more as understanding and a source of information. So I prefer to browse them, but I make trades from time to time. And how's that experience been? I've never done that. It's been really good for me. Yeah. And I don't have a huge track record, but I've personally done well. And I think it's because I've tended to focus on things where I have some conviction and kind of some understanding. Have you learned anything about Wall Street through your Robin Hood adventure? You know, I don't even really think of Robin Hood as a Wall Street company.

1:20:09Wall Street now is like almost a media environment. If you go to the New York Stock Exchange and you see CNBC there, and there's a couple of people trading, but mostly they're trading exotics. So it's sort of like niche products. Mostly it's where you see Jim Cramer and Mad Money and they're like broadcasting. So it has a ceremonial purpose. I think what's happened in the past 30 years, and I think now it's accelerating, is technology. What used to be sort of considered a separate sector, the technology sector, started eating everything. And so the most interesting Wall Street companies aren't really on on Wall Street anymore.

1:20:56It's just like the platforms are in Silicon Valley, I think, increasingly. And it's sort of this long, drawn-out story of people's habits are hard to change. A lot of older people up until recently were still using dial-up internet, right? But with every new generation, I think it becomes easier and easier. And I think Wall Street's like primacy as the center of financial activity is sort of vestigial from this old like brick and mortar in-person way of doing finance. I mean, look at 24-7 trading. So it used to be that even now markets are open according to East Coast Wall Street working hours, right?

1:21:439.30 to 4 p.m. Eastern. But, you know, we rolled out 24-hour market. We unshackled that. And now it's kind of like increasingly markets open Sunday evenings when our 24-hour market session starts. And I think eventually it'll just be indistinguishable. So we're kind of getting rid of the last vestiges of being tied to East Coast, U.S., New York working hours. Tell me about your media diet. I try to ignore most things. The things that are hard for me to ignore are just X. I post on X and I use it a lot for work. And then my feed is kind of this sort of combination of AI-related news. Probably half of it is AI-related and the other half is like financial services, politics, and Robinhood-related.

1:22:39And tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young. I think now I believe that I can do anything and that all it takes is the desire to want to do it. I think when I was young, I very much felt like I was like subject to forces outside of my control and a relatively small amount of things that I could do were under my control. Yeah. Like I could do well in school. I could do my homework and get good grades. But where I lived, what country I was in, what school I went into, outside of my control. And the idea of actually creating a business or building something, like a physical thing that mattered, felt a little bit outside of the realm of possibility.

1:23:35I never felt like I could build something meaningful.

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