Robinhood CEO's Shocking Prediction On Stocks, The AI Bubble, & Gambling Controversy | Vlad Tenev

24:34Graham Stephan:So do you think, though, with Robinhood, eventually you could have just a few people running the entire company from home? It's not our goal for sure. I think sometimes we do think about these things. But I think that someone still has to be running the agents. And at the end of the day, it's like my financial fiduciary point. It's hard to imagine a world where a human is not like responsible for decisions. Yeah. And so I think we've been, we've been focused on doing more with the teams that we have and giving people more leverage. But yeah, less focused on just reducing headcount. What's the biggest mistake that you've made over the last year?

25:26You know, I'm sure I've made lots of little mistakes. I think my approach to things is really just how can I move forward? Like, I don't like thinking about the past very much. I think we can kind of get stuck relitigating decisions. But really, it's about, okay, where are we now? you know, I even in some cases prefer to be behind and to be an underdog because I think it gives us something to work towards and to really push on. I mean, the past year, if I had to think about what we've done, okay, for active traders, we've launched prediction markets and that's an interesting business for us because usually we're not the first to launch a new asset class, you You know, equity trading was a thing for multiple decades, even electronically before Robinhood came along.

26:24We improved it. We brought it to the smartphone. We brought it to zero commission. But, you know, we weren't early to it. Crypto trading, we weren't particularly early either. I mean, we launched in 2018, which was early relative to the TradFi companies. But a lot of crypto native companies started in 2012 or even earlier. Bitstamp, which we acquired, was, you know, I think the longest continuously running crypto exchange. So we were not the earliest there. Prediction Markets, we were one of the first to roll out that product. As soon as they got legalized for the presidential election, we were kind of there within weeks with the product.

27:07And then we had to really expand it over time. And, you know, it's grown to hundreds of millions of annual revenue or fastest growing business line of all time. Um, so active traders, we've done well. Banking, uh, has been a really quick rollout. I think that the challenge that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about is now that we're doing all of these things, how can we make sure the core experience is coherent? And we've been investing a lot more in personalization and making like the app clean. And, you know, I can say, well, maybe, maybe I should have thought more about these problems earlier, but a year ago, we probably didn't have so many new products shipping.

27:53So that's what I've noticed as a daily user, probably hourly user of Robinhood app. Every time I log on, it's like there's more things to swipe through. And a lot of the things I'm not using, but what I find really interesting is you guys launch the prediction markets, but then people could just email customer support and then say, hey, can you like remove this from my account? And I know people that have actually gotten that removed from their account, both for the simplification also because they don't want to be involved with prediction markets, which I found really interesting. You guys were able to like engineer the app for a specific user experience, which is like, I mean, like, I don't know of, I can't name another company that can, that would, that would do that.

28:30Yeah. Yeah. And, and now at first it used to be customer support and now you can actually like flip a switch if you want prediction markets, uh, to nacho sports. and also a lot of our core surfaces. It used to be that Robinhood had only a couple types of accounts. We had your brokerage account, crypto, retirement, spending. Each of those accounts were kind of their own tab, but not everyone used retirement, not everyone used crypto. And there's another problem of what we added, 13 additional accounts, right? Um, so we had to completely redesign things around this idea that, you know, every tab in the app should have a use case for every customer.

29:19So now we have like investment watch list search account, and it's taken a lot of iteration to find the solution that is optimal because every change you make affects tens of millions of existing customers. So it's highly consequential. I do want to say just because I absolutely love this, not that it will necessarily lead to any conversation, but I love the fact that you can open up multiple individual investing accounts. Like ever since you guys had that, like it has completely changed the game for me because now I don't have one strategy in one account and, you know, like, or multiple strategies all consolidated to one account.

29:54Like that and the UI for it is like from a user experience, phenomenal. I am curious, though, on the personality trait of not litigating prior decisions. Do you think that that's an essential trait of an effective CEO? Not necessarily. I think a lot of people. A lot of I and I should make it seem I should make it sound like I don't really think about, you know, what happened in the past. Of course, we do postmortems and reviews and things of that nature. But I think a lot of people just.

30:30Graham Stephan:AI is going to transform your business. Look, we've all heard this, but if you've actually rolled it out in your company, you know how this usually goes. You make the investment, everyone gets onboarded, and a few months later, no one's using it, including you. Well, thankfully, today's sponsor, Superhuman Go, is actually built the stick. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that sits right on the side of your browser, ready to help with any task you're working on. It's actually from the makers of Grammarly, and it works inside the tools and sites your team already uses. Whatever's on your screen, an email, a doc, a website, it already knows what you're looking at.

31:01You're not opening new tabs, pasting stuff in, or explaining yourself from scratch.

31:05Graham Stephan:All you have to do is ask, and it'll summarize along. Email, thread, draft you a reply, or prep you for a meeting without you spending hours. It also searches across all of your tools, so you're not clicking through five different apps trying to remember where something is. Plus, since nobody has to learn anything new, everyone on the team ends up using it. It's the easiest way to get AI into your business. So if you're finally done paying for tools that nobody touches, give Superhuman Go a shot. To find out more, just go to superhuman.com. Again, that is superhuman.com or click the link down below in the description to get started.

31:37Graham Stephan:Thank you again to Superhuman Go for supporting the podcast. Live in the past and spend, you know, 80 % of time worrying about things that have already happened and a little bit less time thinking about, okay, what do we do now? I try always to think about the current state and what my options are rather than saying, oh, if I had changed this six months ago, things would have been different. And I think it's also impossible to a certain extent to think through what would have happened if you'd done something differently in the past, because there's just so many inputs in those decisions. It's a trap, sort of.

32:16It's a trap. And yeah, the important things are never clean in the sense that, oh, if I had just made this one decision differently, my entire life since that point would have been different. A lot of people say that you are one of the most effective CEOs and founders alive today, which I mean, you see it all over X. Well, that's humbling. Well, it probably feels cool to know that. If you were to distill that job description down to one thing, I could see it being problem solver. And so, I mean, would you agree with that sentiment? Running a podcast is honestly a lot more work than people may think from sponsor contracts and invoices and clipping.

32:58It piles up so quickly. I'm not kidding when I say we literally use Claude for everything now, and that's why we are so excited to be partnering with them.

33:06Graham Stephan:Claude is the AI for problem solvers. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. And Cork goes way beyond the chatbot. It's not answering questions, it's actually doing the work. Real spreadsheets, formatted reports, organized files, directly on your computer with no uploads and no cleanup. Plus, Claude's newest model, Fable 5, is live and ready to help you solve your most complex problems.

33:36Graham Stephan:For us, it was actually taxes. We uploaded our bank statements, and Fable 5 went through every document incredibly fast and gave us an organized spreadsheet that was ready to send straight to our accountant. It saved us hours, if not at this point, days. We also use Claude for generating invoices, writing emails, titling videos, setting up test projects, and even editing videos for our Clips channel. The sheer amount of time and money that we have saved from using Claude for our business is just unreal. I kid you not, literally yesterday I was on the phone with my dad driving to Pickleball and I said, Dad, sign up for the Claude Max plan, upload all of your financial statements, and Claude will literally pay for itself with the amount of value it gives you.

34:12You should definitely see what tasks you can take off your plate with Claude.

34:15Graham Stephan:For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai slash iced coffee. That's Claude.ai slash iced coffee, and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai slash iced coffee. AI is going to transform your business. Look, we've all heard this, but if you've actually rolled it out in your company, you know how this usually goes. You make the investment, everyone gets onboarded, and a few months later, no one's using it, including you. Well, thankfully, today's sponsor, Superhuman Go, is actually built the stick. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that sits right on the side of your browser, ready to help with any task you're working on.

34:53Graham Stephan:It's actually from the makers of Grammarly, and it works inside the tools and sites your team already uses. Whatever's on your screen, an email, a doc, a website, it already knows what you're looking at. You're not opening new tabs, pasting stuff in, or explaining yourself from scratch. All you have to do is ask, and it'll summarize along. Email, thread, draft you a reply, or prep you for a meeting without you spending hours. It also searches across all of your tools, so you're not clicking through five different apps trying to remember where something is. Plus, since nobody has to learn anything new, everyone on the team ends up using it.

35:23Graham Stephan:It's the easiest way to get AI into your business. So if you're finally done paying for tools that nobody touches, give Superhuman Go a shot. To find out more, just go to superhuman.com. Again, that is superhuman.com or click the link down below in the description to get started. Thank you again to Superhuman Go for supporting the podcast. A lot of people say that you are one of the most effective CEOs and founders alive today, which I mean, you see it all over X. Well, that's humbling. Well, it probably feels cool to know that. If you were to distill that job description down to one thing, I could see it being problem solver.

36:01And so, I mean, would you agree with that sentiment? I think it depends on the company. I think the job kind of changes dramatically depending on what you're responsible for. So I'll give you an example. If the company is small and you're the CEO and you're just trying to ship your one product to customers and make sure it works, the job is really how quickly can I ship code, right? That's essentially the problem. If you think about it on a base level, problem solver probably does fit, but problem is a very broad term. So small company, how much code can I ship? And I went through this evolution myself because when, when I started at Robinhood, I was writing a lot of code.

36:49Then you kind of get to a point where, okay, maybe we have to do two products at a time and it's not just shipping them, but marketing them, designing them. Right. Uh, and there you're kind of leading a small team of engineers and maybe dealing with a couple of domains that aren't really in your core competency. And I think the challenge there is how do you stay close enough to the work that's being done by the folks that you're managing and also learn enough to be useful about these other domains that you're not an expert in, right? And a lot of times it's just, can you put in the hours and sort of like the mental effort to learn about things that aren't your core competency?

37:39A lot of engineers don't really have an interest in learning about marketing or legal or ops. And I think it's limiting because if you don't know anything about the domain, how can you actually make improvements? Right. Are you, you have to know enough to like realize what's working, what's not working, what you can change. And then, you know, at every layer of scale, it becomes, um, yeah, it becomes harder in a sense because you have more groups of people working on things that you're less directly involved in. And there it's about building systems. Okay. How can I efficiently, if I wanted to spend like five minutes on something, how can I get the best and highest signal five minutes possible?

38:31What are the tools to do that? Do I have the metrics? Do I have customer verbatims? Do I have just like AI tools that are plugged into the right data so that, you know, you can actually make every second that you spend on something as like high signal and useful as it could be. And so that you're not kind of making decisions based on anecdote. So a lot of it is building these systems, organizing things effectively so that you kind of know the person to ask or to probe if something's going wrong or you have a question and also spending time on, on the right things. That's fascinating. I mean, effectively you just distilled down the blueprint of like building a huge company and like how to organize your life as an operator or executive.

39:18If you were to identify one trait or belief that a lot of operators have that are not working at maximum efficiency, like something that's sort of holding them back, what similarity do you see among those people? Like what should the primary question CEOs, operators, executives should be asking themselves in order to become more effective? I think one is being able to get into the details of every team, every work stream. And a lot of people just rely on assessments of people in management, right? But sometimes it's really helpful to get both ends, both ends of the barbell, so to speak, the senior executive's view of a situation and also the people on the ground.

40:15Because you could have the problem of if something breaks somewhere up in the chain and bigger organizations, this is a problem. If you have individual contributors, managers, directors, senior directors, if something's broken in the chain, you could get bad information about what's happening. So that's why I find it very helpful sometimes to go as close to the ground as possible. Look at the code, be able to look at the code, look at the actual copy that's shipping to the website, talk to people who are individual contributors or interns, spend a lot of time talking to interns. And so I think being able to get extremely deep into the details is important.

41:00Not a lot of people do that. And that goes to the work. I think the other thing is just hiring well, making sure that the people around you, in my case, it's like the general managers and the functional leads are incredibly strong. And I think I've been fortunate to evolve to a place where it's just of incredibly capable people that are running really big businesses and growing alongside the businesses that they're running. You know, it's a hilarious parallel to draw there, like staying close to the problem. So we have a friend, his name is Ben Malla, and he buys huge commercial apartment complexes or just commercial real estate.

41:42Like he just bought a new place that's like hundreds of units and he gets his son to move into the complex, to be close to the problem, to know what it's like to actually be a resident at the complex, to know where to make improvements, where to spend money, to have the highest possible return on quality of life for the residents there. And that's kind of similar to what you're saying here. It's like, you need to talk to everybody in the food chain. You need to get like the executive opinion, as well as like the, the person who is actually going in, like, you know, assembling the product's opinion.

42:13Yeah. And also you need to talk to the customer and it's both the customers that are loud on Twitter, the ones that are loud on customer support, which are not always the same. You need to look at what the Redditors are saying, you know, on the, on the different subreddits, but also there's a lot of customers that are quiet and will just silently stop using the product and aren't going to go talk, talk about it to social on social media or write in a support ticket. So you have to figure out how to get to those customers too. I think it, it really helps to be obsessed with your business, right um and and to really feel like you know every little problem is just gonna be on my mind until i figure out uh a way to solve it and you know if i figured out a way to solve it and it's actioned then i can kind of put it away in a little drawer check up on it later but um i think something i've noticed about myself is i spent a lot of time obsessing about every little detail And I think in some cases that can be annoying and sort of not ideal for maybe staying calm and having great mental health, but I think is actually really, really good for the business.

43:36Graham Stephan:What's the next thing you want to do that regulation currently blocks? Oh, that's a great question. I'm sure the regulators will love that one. Yeah, I mean, I think generally we've had really, really strong, constructive relationships with the regulators, particularly in the last couple of years where, yeah, they've been much more keen to support innovation. I think that a couple of things that have been sort of like fresh new issues and, you know, one of the other things we're doing now is we're starting to think about how we can push change in all of these policies rather than just being a participant in them, right?

44:19PDT rule. You guys might be familiar. That rule change came in. We're very supportive of that. So this is a rule where if you don't have$25 ,000 in your account, there's restrictions to day trading. Yeah. So that being repealed was very, very good because essentially what it did was it penalized customers that didn't have a lot of money in their accounts, which a lot of customers start with us. So they don't have a lot of money in their accounts. And they get into these situations where, um, the intent of the rule was probably to prevent them from making rash decisions. But then, then you get into a situation where, you know, if you like want to close your position for a risk management reason, it gets flagged as a day trade, then you get restricted and you basically have to make that decision.

45:09You intend to do it and you, uh, you turn to another broker because actually the other weird thing about this rule is it's on a per broker basis. So if you're a pattern day trader somewhere, you can move your account elsewhere and then you sort of start from scratch. So that was a great positive change. A couple of other things that I'm quite keen on. One, accredited investor. And since we last spoke, we've really been pushing on the idea that private ownership is kind of the next frontier of our mission for various reasons. But the main one, there's a lot of disruption by AI. A lot of the top AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, for instance, are private.

45:56They're going into the trillions of dollars of valuation. And there's a small circle of wealthy insiders that's benefiting from all the growth. It's not broadly distributed. So our solution to that, make it easy to own these companies or get exposure to them. And in the US, we have Robinhood Ventures, which essentially you can think of as a basket of private companies, right? And we have Robinhood Ventures Fund One, which started with late stage, pre-IPO. OpenAI is actually in that fund. and it gave a low cost vehicle for investing and getting exposure to private companies. And kind of on the heels of RVI, we started RV2, Robinhood Ventures Fund 2, which takes another angle.

46:47It's still a basket of private companies, but rather than them being ultra late stage, immediately pre-IPO kind of companies, we went to the opposite side of the spectrum. And now we're giving exposure to seed and series A, which is the earliest stage of capital formation. So rather than tens and hundreds of billions valuations in these companies, Robinhood Ventures Fund 2 typical valuations are in the tens of millions. How do you pick those companies and what if they don't want to be a part of them? Yeah, great question. And this is one of the things we figured out this year. We have taken the position that if a company doesn't want to be in Robinhood Ventures, we generally won't force them.

47:34So every deal that we've done for Robinhood Ventures thus far, and this isn't true of some of our competitors, in which there are a couple, some of our competitors will go in and do the second layer SPV LP interest and then announce it. And then you've seen the company come in and say, actually, we don't know anything about this. Not ideal. So with Robinhood Ventures, we've taken the position that we go direct with the company's blessing in all of these cases. And that's true of all the deals that we've done thus far. And I think this was not an obvious one, right? Because there's a tradeoff. What you really want is the access, but you also are creating a new product and you want that new product to be accepted by the stakeholders in the industry.

48:24Graham Stephan:What if we take it a step further and we say that everyone gets access to these privatized companies? Then wouldn't it be that the really wealthy people just get in even sooner? There's always a cat and mouse game in the sense that the wealthy always figure out how to get better things. And so our job is never done, right? Then we have to keep working to get even earlier access. And then they get in a little earlier too. But I mean, look, Robin, we've been to seed series A. That's like pretty early. It's hard to get earlier. And we're partnering with YC for that fund. So I think we'll prove out the model of seed and series A funding for retail.

49:08Now, the problem with these things is these are still baskets, right? And what we're hearing from customers is maybe I like these three companies, but I don't like these other three. So I think the end state is going to be investing and trading for those that want to individual private names so that they feel pretty close to what trading a public stock on Robinhood would feel. And that part needs both continued product innovation and also reform of accredited investor standards, which now limit direct investments to private companies to high earning wealthy people.

49:49Graham Stephan:Is there any other product that you wish existed? Like for me, I wish that you guys had or someone created a Venmo where we could send each other stocks. Like instead of sending Jack a hundred bucks, I'd be like, yo, here's a hundred dollars of Google. yeah and you know last time you guys asked me for robin hood social right uh and i said oh well maybe uh we'll have something to announce in the future and you know he said to me the audacity of gram to say this he was all he was all you know didn't we say something about a robin hood social last time and then they launched it and i was like if you think that because you suggested robin hood social i thought right afterwards vlad was like yo let's do it let's launch it yeah launch it.

50:27Graham Stephan:Yeah. Um, yeah, no, I thought it was funny because obviously, uh, it had been in the works, you know, we, we, we didn't just whip it up. We didn't just whip it up in a couple of weeks, uh, from, from when, uh, we had that conversation to hood summit when we announced it. But, um, yeah, there's always, sometimes I get asked about things in the works and, um, I really want to like spill the beans right there, but then I'm like, ah, well we have these events we're launching things. So if we just keep guessing, you just wouldn't say no. You can tell based on my reaction, probably what's in the works or not, even though I try to keep a very, very calm poker face.

51:04But, you know, Robinhood Social has done well. And now I don't know if you guys are seeing it, but people have started cross posting Robinhood Social screenshots on X. Yeah. And they're like, what's going on in this community? And that's bringing in more.

51:17Graham Stephan:People need to be verified, by the way, because my profile is up there. And I think people think that I'm a scammer. on Robinhood Social because they don't have a checkmark. Like there's no way to verify that is actually my account. Graham underscore Stefan. Okay, I'm at JLSSELBY. Follow us on Robinhood Social, guys. Oh, well. Yeah, but that means someone else is going to create one that's very similar and then they're going to like start like scamming. I don't know. We'll have to figure this out. Okay. Yeah. I mean, the one thing that we think works really well with Robinhood Social is the fact that the trades and the portfolios are verified.

51:51And, you know, now we have PNL widgets and all of these things. So in, in other social media platforms where people are sharing your trades, you don't really know whether they're BSing or they could be faking the screenshots. With Robinhood Social, we kind of take care of that verification as part of the platform, which I think is like, uh, had a really nice, it's a, it's a positive and also differentiated aspect. But yeah, we'll, we'll obviously have to solve this.

52:21Graham Stephan:AI is going to transform your business. Look, we've all heard this, but if you've actually rolled it out in your company, you know how this usually goes. You make the investment, everyone gets onboarded, and a few months later, no one's using it, including you. Well, thankfully, today's sponsor, Superhuman Go, is actually built the stick. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that sits right on the side of your browser, ready to help with any task you're working on. It's actually from the makers of Grammarly, and it works inside the tools and sites your team already uses. Whatever's on your screen, an email, a doc, a website, it already knows what you're looking at.

52:52You're not opening new tabs, pasting stuff in, or explaining yourself from scratch.

52:56Graham Stephan:All you have to do is ask, and it'll summarize along. Email, thread, draft you a reply, or prep you for a meeting without you spending hours. It also searches across all of your tools, so you're not clicking through five different apps trying to remember where something is. Plus, since nobody has to learn anything new, everyone on the team ends up using it. It's the easiest way to get AI into your business. So if you're finally done paying for tools that nobody touches, give Superhuman Go a shot. To find out more, just go to superhuman.com. Again, that is superhuman.com or click the link down below in the description to get started.

53:28Graham Stephan:Thank you again to Superhuman Go for supporting the podcast. Verification problem for the profiles as well. Is there any financial product that's not really being discussed though? Because as someone who's so on the pulse with customer demand and just broad investing data, there has to be like whispers of some sort of investment style. Like no one thought five, maybe 10 years ago that we would have AI investing agents. Yeah. Right. But someone may have. And I feel like you would probably be the person of all to ask, like, what could the future of finance look like? Something we may not even be talking about right now in five to 10 years.

54:03Is there some sort of product or service or like something else? Yeah. I mean, Robinhood chain, I think, is a good example of what the future could be if we could like rebuild the infrastructure from the ground up. I don't know if you guys are familiar with Robinhood chain. It's basically the hottest chain in crypto right now. We rolled it out a couple of weeks ago and it's been top five in DEX volume. The TVL, total value locked, has been growing tremendously. And one of the benefits is it has stock tokens, which are tokenized representations of stocks that are available for customers outside the US for now.

54:47But they're still available in 120 plus countries around the world. And if you're on Robinhood chain and you have stock tokens like Tesla, NVIDIA or others, you actually can do everything with them that you can do with another on-chain crypto. So you can send them to people on-chain, just like you would send Bitcoin or Ethereum. You can swap them in pools. Uniswap has some very, very active pools on Robinhood chain. You can do collateralization, lending and borrowing. So you get a picture of what it could look like if we kind of replaced it all with software.

55:29Graham Stephan:So when you say swapping, does that mean that let's just say I have$500 ,000 worth of gains in a stock that I could swap that stock for another, keeping my cost basis without realizing a gain? The tax situation depends on where you are, right? Every one of these 120 countries has slightly different tax treatment, so I can't really speak generally to that. But yeah, all you have to do is create a pool. If someone creates a pool exchanging a stock token with a crypto, yeah, you can just swap them directly. So we started out using stablecoin. So USDG, which is the stablecoin that we partnered with Paxos and a few others to launch.

56:20That's like the core stablecoin of the chain. But then all the developers have created all kinds of unique pools that we didn't even think would exist. And in all kinds of protocols where, for example, if you hold a meme coin, you just get stock tokens airdropped to you, right? So they've connected meme coins, core cryptos, and the stock tokens and composed them into unique products that we wouldn't have anticipated creating. We probably wouldn't have thought of to make ourselves. So Robinhood Chain is this combination of developer platform with financial primitives like high yield and stock tokens that we're going to add to.

57:09And I think the combination of those two is going to lead to a lot of interesting things. Not to mention, you know, it was built for AI agents too. So a lot of people have been rolling out APIs, command line interfaces.

57:23Graham Stephan:I'm just imagining if you would try to explaining this to Warren Buffett, like what he would say, like if this is even something he would understand and say, no, this is just. I mean, I think to most consumers who aren't developers, the value prop is really if you're in 120 countries all over anywhere in the world, if you have a smartphone, internet connection, you can trade tokenized representations of these stocks 24-7 at relatively low cost and great user experience. But then even if you're a U.S. resident, then you can be trading outside of trading hours all day. It effectively opens up the optionality of an investor.

58:09Yeah. So right now they're not available in the U.S., but there has been movement to enable tokenization here. And I think eventually it will happen. It's just the delta in value is much smaller. It would be like, you know, in a lot of these places overseas, they don't even have functional banking systems. So they can go right to tokenized stocks and it's a huge leap, right? Whereas in the US, you already have Robinhood. So going from Robinhood to like 24-7 is comparatively minor. It would be like going from your very fast train to a high-speed train, right? Expensive shift. A lot of the existing train operators aren't keen to make the investment and you can already get from New York to D.C.

59:00in two hours. So shaving it to one hour maybe maybe isn't the biggest delta. And so I think that's why the rest of the world is leading here. And the U.S. is probably going to be a late adopter of some of these technologies. What do you think the other brokerages fail to understand about investing in 2026?

59:20Graham Stephan:Now really quick, I gotta say that everyone has a business idea that they've been sitting on. And what stops most people really isn't the idea itself. It's everything that comes after it. We're talking building a store, taking payments, the checkout page. But it's actually very straightforward when our partner Shopify handles it for you. Everything that you need to start selling is included and ready from day one. That includes the moment your first customer is ready to pay. Shopify checkout helps more of them actually finish their purchase. Plus when they come back, their details are already saved.

59:47It's one tap and they're done. I've personally used Shopify several times because before I was working with Graham, I set up probably five or six different Shopify stores, and even me actually saw some sales, and I knew absolutely nothing. Shopify is genuinely the easiest way to start an online brand and see real sales coming in.

1:00:05Graham Stephan:Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to small everyday businesses just getting started. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business, so go make it one. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash ICH. Once again, that is Shopify.com slash ICH. One more time at Shopify.com slash ICH with the link down below in the description to get started. What do you think the other brokerages fail to understand about investing in 2026? I think the other brokerages suffer from just being large. I mean, I think there's a lot of players in the space, right?

1:00:44There's the incumbents that are big and they have tens of trillions in assets. But yeah, I think we ship much faster and we're more modern, which means that we've been able to capture a younger customer base that is growing wealthier over the next couple of decades as opposed to aging out. And so we're kind of the beneficiary of this great wealth transfer over time. So if you were a paid consultant to the other brokerages, what would you tell them? I think to some degree, um, it starts with talent. Like if, if you want to build really, really great products that are competitive and 10 times better than, um, And what's already out there, um, there, there needs to be like a talent reset and you have to make sure really good engineers and designers and product builders, people that understand AI are in the company.

1:01:44Um, so I, I would probably find one area and these companies are like giant elephants, right? You can't eat the elephant in one bite. As they say, you have to, you have to just take it one, one bite at a time. You eat it very slowly. So I'd probably find one area which maybe was small and kind of circumscribed away from the core and try to like inject a ton of talent into that one area, run it kind of standalone separately and see if that can provide a roadmap of how we can do like a technology transformation for the entire company. And so if we get a beachhead in one area and we're able to hire special forces, elite talent there, then we kind of like put more into there and see that grow till eventually the entire company is rebuilt with a stronger foundation.

1:02:45In terms of the broader economy, are you worried about valuations? I think in some sectors, alarm bells have started ringing. I'll give you an example. I mean, we get a lot of feature requests from our customers all the time, right? And for the longest time, international stocks was not in the top 10. I mean, some people wanted international stocks, but, you know, a couple, maybe a month or two ago, every question I would get in an interview was, when are you going to add Korean stocks? That's what everyone wants. Nobody wants prediction markets or crypto. We just want Korean stocks. I don't know if you guys experienced this.

1:03:28Very familiar with what's going on. Or were you some of the people that were asking for them? Probably Jack. I'm just saying anything. And by the way. Must be Samsung. As long as they do options on Korean stocks. And by the way, we will add Korean stocks. But the fact that we were hearing from so many people at the same time does raise the alarm bells a little bit of like what's going on there. And sure enough, there was just.

1:03:54Graham Stephan:So what are you seeing today starting to ring some bells? I have to be careful here because I don't want to give people investment advice. And also to be fair, traditionally our customers are innovation first. So we were among the first to invest in electric vehicles. They're obviously into crypto. So AI, even though exposure directly to AI labs is difficult and we're fixing it with Robin Hood Ventures, you've got the semiconductors and now you've got a lot of people talking about energy. Right. So I guess chips and energy as a category, you have a very, very complicated balancing act to play.

1:04:43Because on the one hand, it is kind of obvious if you assume people are saying, well, if AI demand continues to grow, of course, that's going to impact chips and everything in the stack underneath it. On the other hand, what you have is the traders. And this includes, you know, there's been anecdotes of hedge funds that are just buying chips because they know, hey, even if I don't need this chip myself, I'll be able to resell it at a higher price. and whether something is undervalued or not kind of depends on many of these factors and and i could see it tipping in one direction and you know if it if a lot of the supply is being bought by speculators that's when you can kind of get into trouble with you know even something that has fundamental growth potential like uh chips in an ai environment do you think that a high stock market right now is actually bad for people in their 20s and 30s everything i think is is an opportunity in a sense.

1:05:42Back in 2020, when we had a big crash right around COVID, you saw our customers actually buying, and you looked at the customers of the other discount brokers and they were selling, and that was the big story. Our customers were buying because they're younger, they had a long-term horizon, and they saw it as an opportunity. They were still fundamentally bullish about the country and of all the things that were being built and what the stock market offered. And they kind of showed that through their activity on the platform. In a sense, a lot of people say, well, do you worry about stock market corrections?

1:06:23I don't worry about them as much because we've seen in the past that having younger customers, They take corrections as opportunities. Now, that doesn't mean that I want a correction or I even want a sustained period of slightly lower prices. That can be very, very challenging to the economy and to people. Uh, I think everyone generally should just want things to go up smoothly up into the right, but, uh, it's not the reality. And I think every market environment, if you're a trader presents opportunities that you can capitalize on. And if you're a long-term investor, it can be hard to predict these things and time them.

1:07:03So we offer great tools for, uh, tax advantaged investing. investing. I think we have the best retirement products on the market where it's really targeted towards putting money in and not withdrawing for many, many decades. And I think dollar cost averaging and passive management is better at Robinhood than at any of our competitors. A lot of our competitors don't even offer good tools for these things, but we're continuing to invest and incentivize. A lot of people criticize us because they think we incentivize active trading and prediction markets, if you look at what we actually incentivize in the product, it's retirement.

1:07:42Retirement gives you a 3 % match if you're a gold member and you make a contribution. So those are the types of products that we've really directly incentivized and had success incentivizing.

1:07:55Graham Stephan:Now, what do you say to the people who criticize that it is leaning too heavy into prediction markets, which might be considered too close to gambling? Yeah, we get that criticism. And of course, you mentioned the switcher and being able to customize it. We get the criticism in both directions, actually. You know, we have people that just don't want to see prediction markets. And for that, we have personalization and all the initiatives we have, not just for you to disable it, but also to make sure that we show you the content that you want to see in the app when you want to see it. It's a big priority, not just with prediction markets, but also the more different products and features we have.

1:08:38We have to solve the problem of you just not being aware of us offering a great feature that you can benefit from. Um, so yeah, there's, there's both. I don't want to see this product prediction markets being a great example. Also, I want to see it more like it's too buried in the product and I don't want it to be, you know, three taps away. I just want to see what's going on right now. And I think personalization is an answer. Uh, the other thing we've been experimenting with is in some cases, if really the experience is very, very different, we break it out into a separate app, which is what we did with banking.

1:09:19So if you want like a banking and a card experience, you can have that in the banking app. If you want a more trading first experience, you have like the main green Robinhood app. And if you want full crypto, the Robinhood wallet has like DeFi native experience. What do you think the critics are getting right that you could improve on? I mean, I think that making things cohesive and making the purpose of the company and what we stand for more understandable is a fair critique. We hear that a little bit. Everyone always wants features, and it's hard for me. I mean, the Korean stocks, I think they're right.

1:09:58I think we probably should have Korean stocks as well as stocks from every single market. there's just a bunch of stuff that we just haven't gotten to yet because there's always more and more to build and the way that i think about this is there's kind of three buckets of thing right infrastructure improvements that just make the existing experience better like faster performance like just better nicer cleaner ui ux uh reliability so that we just can handle traffic spikes better and things like that. And we made tremendous progress there, even in the past year, actually. There's the category of what's available at other brokers that Robinhood doesn't have.

1:10:47And that's a big category. Up until recently, it's trust accounts. International stocks are available at some of our competitors. You've got things like fixed income, If you want to buy direct bonds, mutual funds, you know, there's a lot of things that we don't offer that are sizable parts of portfolios of customers. Right. And then there's this third bucket, which I think can be easy to overlook. Not a lot of people have products here, but it's just like, can we innovate and can we be the first to market with, with new products relative to our peer set at least. And that's where things like prediction markets, Robinhood Ventures, entirely net new product, things like Robinhood Chain and Robinhood Earn.

1:11:33Like we also want to put things in there that are completely unexpected. Agentic trading we're talking about. I mean, nobody, nobody big, nobody non-trivial is like working on agentic trading besides us. Right. Like we're just figuring that out.

1:11:50Graham Stephan:Slightly off topic, are you ever worried about the billionaire tax here in California? I try not to think about it very much. Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's one of those things where, yeah, I mean, California has this interesting kind of referendum based structure where if you get enough support, even if the governor or local politicians or, you know, the people support or are opposed to something, you can get on the ballot anyway. I think we have a prediction market on this. So you could hedge yourself in a way. Technically, I could, although that's not one of the deepest markets. But yeah, I think it's showing it as a minority.

1:12:36So hopefully that does hold. What would change in your life if there was a billionaire tax? Well, a couple of things. Um, one, I think the real risk isn't to me personally, although obviously it would not be amazing. Um, it's to the ecosystem here. Right. Um, so I think, I think the real risk is it could be like a own goal for California because there's basically been two industries that California hasn't just been leading. the country, but has been leading the world in many cases. One is entertainment industry, Hollywood. And that's just gotten decimated in the past 10 years. And a lot of it is policy decisions that are own goals, not giving incentives to people to shoot and film and to hire people locally.

1:13:32So then they're flying to Atlanta or Canada or Eastern Europe. And it's hard to break this network, but I think that what's happened in Hollywood has shown that that network can be broken. If you have filming and studios moving elsewhere, and then eventually the talent and the directors and actors move elsewhere, and then you get to a point where they're not even having the award shows in LA because nobody lives there anymore. So I think there's a real danger of that. Could that happen to the technology industry? Um, I think it was looking fairly bleak for technology in San Francisco during COVID people were talking about moving to Texas, moving to Florida and AI kind of resuscitated things.

1:14:18But, um, I think what happened in LA shows that we shouldn't take, uh, this for granted. Yeah. What, what the real risk is, you know, I think a lot of people will, nobody's going to want to be taxed every single year, 5 % of their wealth. And these taxes do tend to start, uh, very, very popular, but then eventually they cover everyone's. Um, and over time, I think you could actually get to a situation where the lost revenue from people paying moderate taxes, but doing them consistently is much higher than the one-time hit of taxing someone once and them leaving the state. And a lot of people have already left the state, actually, before the initial taxation would hit.

1:15:13So even the threat of this happening has been so severe that some people have bailed in relatively large numbers, pretty significant taxpayers. If a billionaire tax passes on a personal level, what would that do to you? Would you just be forced to sell some of your stake in your company? I think it depends a lot on implementation. Some of it hasn't been precisely laid out. yeah but I think a lot of people would be forced to I mean the bulk of my wealth is Robinhood shares so on a cursory reading I think a lot of people would have to sell shares in their companies do you keep your Robinhood shares in Robinhood no yeah too many eggs in one basket no no it's it's not because of that it's just because currently you got a three percent a cat's transfer fee to some other place it's like oh well that's i'm i'm i'm saving it for when uh yeah for for rainy day um uh no because uh my shares and the shares of all our um uh employees are administered by um there's like special requirements for how to administer employee stock purchase plans and, uh, what are called 10 B five, one plans, which is, I can't just freely trade my Robin hood shares, right.

1:16:41I have to trade them under a specific plan that's filed in advance. Yeah. Because of material, non-public information. So there are, uh, companies that deal with this, and it's like a B2B thing. Like I will actually create a deal with, you know, a pre-IPO company to manage their ESPP, to manage their 10B5 ones and I become the vendor. Do you trade on Robinhood? I do, yeah. So you'll like wake up, check the app, make a investment. But also what's interesting is when you sign up for Robinhood, you have to check the boxes. that no one else does, right? Yeah. When I'm signing up for a new brokerage, I say, no, no, no, no.

1:17:30I don't know anyone that's a 10 % owner in a company or this or that. Like I'm not affiliated by any means with like, like I say no to all those disclosures, but you actually have to say yes. How does that change on a personal investing way? I have to be really careful trading individual stocks. I think ETFs are pretty simple and pretty clean. crypto. For a while, I was doing a lot of crypto because I love crypto, right? I love trading. I love being in the trenches with people. Are you posting on Reddit? A lot of trenchers. I don't post on Reddit anymore, sadly. Anymore, okay. Yeah, at one point I was a Redditor.

1:18:10Early on in my Robinhood journey, I think I got off of Reddit. Um, but, uh, yeah, crypto has been kind of nice because, um, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a fun trading product. Futures was nice when we launched it. Prediction markets as well. But yeah, individual stocks. Um, yeah, there's, there's a lot of restrictions.

1:18:31Graham Stephan:So what crypto do you have and own? Hey, by the way, really quick. If you want extra content just like this, as well as early access and a bonus post show posted every single week, feel free to join as a channel member to get immediate access to all of that, as well as early access to everything else that we post, along with priority responses to all of your comments. So if that sounds cool, feel free to join. Would love to have you on board. Thanks so much. We'll get back to the podcast now. What crypto do you have and own? And again, I don't want to get into recommendations, but I have a pretty diversified portfolio, to be honest with you.

1:19:10Are you bullish on Bitcoin? You know, Bitcoin is singular in a lot of ways, which makes it special. It was the first asset. It was the original meme coin, right? The brand of it is quite strong because nobody can ever, you can create lots of Bitcoin imitators, but nobody can ever take the position of being the first and most trusted. it's the you know main coin that companies think about as they're building out crypto treasuries to diversify against inflation and and do all sorts of things so yeah long term i'm bullish on bitcoin i think it is singular and i think that gives it an advantage over comparable coins yeah but yeah i can't tell you you're out if it's gonna hit a million or anything like that

1:19:58Graham Stephan:one thing i want to ask you is that recently there is a bitcoin hack with the cold wallet and Bitcoin was stolen. How do you make sure that if, let's say I deposit Bitcoin on Robinhood, that that cryptocurrency is safe and that on your end, there couldn't be a hack or that like there's an employee who just makes a mistake, who types in a wrong little number and like something gets out there. And then I think there's defense in depth and what's called defense in depth with these things. So without getting into the exact details of our crypto custody infrastructure because there are a lot of hackers out there.

1:20:38You don't want to have too much of your crypto easily accessible to people. In fact, the lion's share of it should be in cold storage where you have to go and get pieces of paper, ideally. And not exactly how it works, but it should just be not connected to the internet and highly secure. So that way, even if there was an issue with the hot wallet, it covers a very small minority of crypto assets. Then you have to constantly make sure that you're hardening your infrastructure, you're watching out for and preventing possible security breaches and incidents. is very, very important in this environment because you have mythos and fable and the AI tools are, if there is a vulnerability, you can't rely on it being just hard to find or it being too expensive.

1:21:39So that before AI tools, it used to be that you wouldn't have to worry as much because you had to worry about these state-sponsored actors that would go after the softest, largest targets. And in reality, you know, there's much there's banks that hold trillions of assets that have poor, relatively poor cybersecurity postures. So they're just, you know, being attacked everywhere. But now, you know, it's so cheap to spin up another job that you really have to make sure that there's no holes. And I think, uh, you have to do that with like penetration testing, internal red teaming, and also, uh, using the AI tools themselves to scan and attack you like they, like they were an adversary.

1:22:24So I think we invest a lot in this and we're fortunate to be at the frontier of a lot of these tools and to actually spend a lot of resources and a lot of our mindshare in securing all these things. And I think the surface area is always rising, right? Now we have Robinhood Chain, we have all of our DeFi products, we have, of course, the traditional business as well as crypto. So investing in security is a huge priority. What are your personal goals outside of Robin Hood? I've really been focused on teaching my kids math. I still think math is important. Getting them to enjoy learning and be curious.

1:23:09So whenever I get time to spend with them, which is never as much as I would like, but I try to like talk to them about history, encourage them to do math, see how they're doing in school. I think they have certain benefits that I didn't have when I was a kid. I mean, they could get access to the best tutors. They could, you know, talk to anyone they want. And my concern is always, like, how do you get the benefits of that without the downsides? And the downsides of growing up as my kid is...

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1:25:19Graham Stephan:Required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Like stuff can be easy for you. And maybe there's not the incentive that I had to be hungry, right? You know, if I didn't like work hard, my parents told me very directly, we don't have the money to send you to college. Very likely you're going to have to get a scholarship, which means you're going to have to do all these things. And by the way, you know, we were visa holders. So our status in this country was very, very uncertain. And there was always the threat of, okay, if you don't do well, maybe the family will have to go back to Bulgaria.

1:25:53Right. Yeah. And I think there's a little bit less of that, which is good in some ways, but, but also it can be, uh, it can be hard to like manufacture hunger if it's not really there. Right. But yeah, I'm, I'm very proud of them actually, because despite this, I think they're, um, yeah, they're, they're growing up to be great humans. Uh, yeah. Other, other goals. I think about my health. I'm getting a little older now. So I want to make sure that the body and the mind is working well. How do you do that? Do you do blood testing, CT scans? I've done the full body MRI thing. I do blood testing.

1:26:33I just try to work out regularly. I've been getting into like sauna and cold plunge and contrast therapy. I also have been trying really hard to have a routine before I go to sleep because too easy for me. I get into the thing of like being on my phone or my iPad and just looking at the company slack or reading docs till literally the last moment before I close my eyes. Yeah. Like my phone just whacks me in the head in bed. So what I'm trying to do now is journal a little bit for 10 to 15 minutes and then read a physical print book for, you know, 15 to 20 minutes before I go to sleep so that, you know, things just get to wind down a little bit.

1:27:25What kind of books do you read and have you noticed an actual benefit from journaling? Yeah, I think the, I have noticed a benefit from journaling. You know, one thing is journaling for me, I have a little bit of a structure to it. So I write a little bit about what happened in the day, or sometimes I do like a Sunday journaling where I think about the whole week, the week behind and then the week forward. So again, breaking my rule of not thinking about the past. I do think about the past, but just in a way that helps me inform what I want to do in the future, either today or the following week.

1:28:06What I like to do is I think about the period in question. What went well? I write those things down. Those make me feel good. What could have gone better? And then I say, okay, if I had to do some things this week, here's the list. And the list can be quite long, right? It's like, I want to get 10 things, but then I sort them based on what's the most important. And then I look back on the last one, see how I did. And certain things I carry over. Other things I say, I actually finished this. This is awesome. But then, yeah, I have a list of the week ahead and the day ahead. And what happens is when I wake up the next morning, I kind of look it over and then I feel really good starting my day.

1:28:56I think what can be a source of stress is just being completely input driven. And you kind of wake up in the morning and you're like, let me look at what other people want from me. Right. What are the fires? Are there any emergencies? What are people texting me about? And then, yeah, the risk is you just don't get the important things done. So I think this at least forces me to think about what the important things are and make sure that I'm aware if they got done or if they didn't get done. And it helps them get done as well. That's interesting to be more output driven. It's like signal and noise.

1:29:33It's like always said in all of these different ways. And they say one of the main sources of happiness is feeling like you're in control of your own destiny. and that translated to this is basically like what must I do for myself and for my business as opposed to what fires do I need to respond to it's like you're not you're no longer in control of your life if all you're ever doing is responding to things and external stimulus oh well there's a fire over here on this side of the business let me tend to this as opposed to like here's where I'm at this is what I'm going to do and I'm going to push for this yeah I think a big source of unhappiness is to kind of feel like things are out of your control, even though they aren't.

1:30:14Even, you know, some of my fondest memories looking back are when I went through some kind of crisis, right? And I went through the crisis and I think back about what was going through my mind at that time. And, you know, now with the benefit of distance, I'm like, oh, that was a really interesting time. It almost seems fun in retrospect because now, now I appreciate it. But at that time I was really stressed out, right? Not enjoying it at all, not sleeping. And, you know, I think about how much better would it be to actually have been enjoying it or or be in a state of flow at the time, even though a lot of crises are something happens that you have to deal with.

1:31:07But I think even those things are under your control at the end of the day, because whether you're happy or not or motivated or in a state of flow really depends on your mindset as you're processing these things.

1:31:22Graham Stephan:In terms of raising your children, do you feel like math is more important than social skills? or our social skills going to be more important in a world where AI could do just about any math imaginable. Did you see that Peter Thiel thing? He was, uh, he was asked about this a couple of years ago and he said, well, you know, at that time math or, uh, AI was getting really good at writing, right. And you could just one shot a history essay, um, with just a simple prompt. And so the conventional wisdom was, okay, the math skills were going to be very, very important, but gosh, writing essays or copywriting, be worried about that.

1:32:02He said, oh no, uh, I'm much more worried about the math people than the word people because for the longest time, actually, um, word people were dominant in society, but only recently has math been, um, a prized skill set. And yeah, by and large, he basically put the reason for this basically on wokeness, because math is egalitarian in the sense that you could actually test different populations for mathematical ability and you have outliers no matter what your income is. But for verbal ability and words and, you know, how well read you are, it does skew quite heavily towards, you know, people that have higher net worth and socioeconomic status.

1:32:59So the past, uh, 50 years or so, maybe even a little bit longer, uh, has been generally the flow has been towards like more egalitarian, more progressive. Um, and so the math people have gotten an, an advantage. Um, but yeah, maybe that could be reversing.

1:33:19Graham Stephan:Yeah. So we were speaking with Chris Camillo yesterday, who was telling us that he wants his kids to be just well-traveled, interesting people who are good with networking. Yeah. Because in a world with AI, he thinks that in-person relationships and conversations are going to matter more than they ever have. And if a person is really well-traveled, who has interesting stories and knows how to relate to someone else, that'll be irreplaceable by any sort of program. I think my point of view is a little bit different. I still think math is very, very important because my experience is math generalizes.

1:33:53So if you're really, really good at solving theoretical math problems, and I don't mean just like multiplying together big numbers, I mean like abstract theoretical math. It's a pure form of problem solving. And that pure form of problem solving can generalize to all kinds of business situations. I mean, I studied math. I was pretty good at it. I never studied business. Um, but I felt like being better at math trained me to think better and thinking better helps you in business and so many other things. Um, so I do think it's helpful. And I think that, um, you know, being better at thinking and thinking clearly helps you as you're networking.

1:34:44or creating relationships as well. The things needed to be better at math help you become more curious. So I view it as very fundamental. Yeah, which is in part why I also started another company a couple of years ago, building AI for math, what I call mathematical super intelligence. And the bet there is if you build a system that's really, really good at math, it can basically be really good at any economic activity. starting with coding, which is the closest, but probably it can write you a better history essay eventually as well.

1:35:22Graham Stephan:How has your perspective changed over the last nine months since we last filmed? Well, I've shipped social as per your recommendation. You're very welcome. You asked me before what products are people not talking about enough. I still think even though there is a policy discussion on private markets, we have to do more to spread the word that, hey, this asset class is now available to individual investors. And I think we've been trying to do that through various means, but it's not like, I don't think we're at the point where it's had its full mass market moment. So these are kind of undiscovered little gems that only relatively few customers know about.

1:36:05agentic trading another example there's a lot of policy discussion on it the folks that are extremely sophisticated are aware of it but it's still a hundred thousand it's not at 10 million customers so there's a lot of growing there yeah and i think now you know me personally i mean probably the first time we spoke graham was 2021 right that was what uh five years ago yeah i

1:36:31Graham Stephan:I think so. Yeah. Five years ago. Um, I think I've gone through from this journey of being kind of a newbie, uh, young person in this industry to now kind of being in the middle, right? Still young enough to kind of understand what the Gen Zs are doing and saying, even though I really can't figure out TikTok yet, haven't made much progress there, but now I'm kind of old enough to I guess be thought of as an industry person. And I think this middle area is kind of interesting for me, right? Because I can kind of hang in Washington, have a policy discussion and be taken seriously, maybe in a way that 25 or 30 year old Vlad wouldn't have.

1:37:21But I'm still kind of in touch with, you know, all the folks on social media, all the folks in the trenches and the ability to kind of bridge both, I think is unique given where I am in life. And I'm just trying to enjoy that and take advantage of it.

1:37:44Graham Stephan:Yeah. I do have to say you're doing an incredible job. And I think the last time that Jack and I were here, we both left thinking that, oh my gosh, your passion like the fact that you would come on a podcast and talk with us openly for two hours and nothing was off limits and you just allowed it like that i think speaks volumes and after that i'm like oh man i am bullish on robin hood well it's great but it's i think it's because of you specifically not necessarily robin hood's company but because of your passion and your enthusiasm and how into it you are. So I think that goes like a long, long way.

1:38:20I think the exciting thing about Robin Hood is I become more bullish and excited as the years pass because the mission itself becomes much more expansive and much more interesting. And now we're talking about things that are on a civilizational scale, like how can we increase the ability of billions of people to own stocks, own private companies, own real world assets. And I think that's a really, really hard problem. And to actually move the needle on that, you need to do lots of other little things right that are very hard to do. And you have to engage and entertain people because inherently these are kind of boring things and you're never going to get everyone unless you make it a little bit more engaging as well.

1:39:11If you were consulting our podcast, our business, what do you think we could be doing better? So a little reverse interview. Let's see. How many viewers are you guys at now?

1:39:24Graham Stephan:Total subscribers? 1.63 million on YouTube, but it's way more across all platforms. How many viewers per episode? Yeah. Probably on average, and there is some volatility there, but like on average, maybe 300 to 400 ,000 people listen to every episode. Okay. That's the long form. And that's the long form. But then on top of that, we have distribution. So we have like clips and we have shorts and we're on every social media platform. Last year, we did 1.2 billion views across all platforms. Okay. And what is your North Star? Like if you wanted to be remembered for one thing, one contribution for the podcast, what would that be?

1:40:05Graham Stephan:That's really the guest selection. We just want to have really inspiring guests who could teach our audience something and show them a different perspective that maybe they didn't consider before. And so for me, it's just getting the best guest possible who we just want to have a conversation with. Got it. But is it like we want to get to 100 million subscribers? Does that matter? Getting to a billion subscribers, getting a billion views per podcast? Is that like an anti-goal? No, I think like at this point in terms of growth, like I think growth is sort of something that will ensue to our other goal, which is like talk to interesting people, you know, be as objective as possible and fair and be entertaining and fun and funny, but also, you know, educational.

1:40:49If you had to think and you don't have to say me, obviously, I know that it's me. But besides me, what was the best episode that you have had? It's hard to say best because we've been doing this six years. So we're picking between hundreds of people. But like most memorable episodes would be Dr. K, who's like a psychiatrist, oddly enough, who's been trained in Eastern and Western medicine. And that was fascinating. Also, another one, we love talking to Ben Mala, like the commercial real estate. Kevin O 'Leary is fantastic. Stephen O 'Leary, Chris Camillo, Stradman, who's like a car. Like we just have so many, everybody that virtually every person we talk to, we're like super, super, super excited.

1:41:25We would like to have them back on. Papa John, you know, that was absurd to be able to talk to him at his house. And string theory.

1:41:31Graham Stephan:He's really into string theory. Papa John likes string theory? Yeah, he brought it up unprompted. Wow. Yeah, we had no idea what to do, but it was fun. Yeah, string theory is... Please don't. where we're getting at is that we feel like we have so much potential and we have such a big impactful platform that we just don't know what's next and we're good at this but we feel like there's something more there's something extra that we could be doing and we don't know what on earth it is also to be frank i think we're severely under monetized like realistically to be able to get 1.2 billion views and in the finance space in the finance space like i i I don't think that we're like, I just want to focus on this.

1:42:14I don't really want to focus on like a business or something to like redirect viewership to or more sales. I want to focus just on content, but also in doing so, I think that a lot of other people have given the, uh, the maximal amount of marketing that we're able to like provide basically for free, um, they would be able to turn a greater profit. Yeah. I think that makes sense. Um, Um, yeah, I guess, and if you think about these shows, the, the, the best where you felt that you've done the best work, is it, do you judge it based on views or comments or how the audience has resonated with it? Or is it more like, Hey, that was a really good conversation for me.

1:42:56I loved being a part of that.

1:42:58Graham Stephan:It's gotta be both. Yeah. It's gotta be both because I look at the metrics and I'm very analytical about the data and I say, Oh, this underperform. Why? Yeah. And then I try to improve it because if it underperforms, I think that means the audience didn't watch enough of it and they clicked out. Why did they click out? Why did they not like that? But for me personally, I also just enjoy the conversations. Yeah. I mean, I think that I can tell it's a labor of love for you guys that you really care about it. You're trying to get better. It's really engaging. Yeah. And I think that it comes across.

1:43:31I mean, I enjoy watching it. Um, I think that if I had to give one, uh, area for improvement, I think that the, the sort of like North star of having really interesting guests that you guys want to learn from. And you think the audience could learn from is, is probably one that you'd hear from a lot of podcasts, like basically lots of podcasts, just want to have fun guests and, uh, have it be great educational content. But, um, I guess the, the answer to the question of, you know, why would I watch, you know, Graham and Jack versus those others could use more differentiation, right? Um, like what is the one thing that they'll get here that they won't get anywhere?

1:44:26I'll give you an example. I listened to acquired podcast and I just don't think anyone else does exactly what they do. You know, if, if I, if, if I get, uh, another episode of that, I know exactly what it is. It's like a four hour thing where those guys are having fun and chatting, but it's like a four hour deep dive on one specific company. I kind of know the formula. Um, and, and I think it's differentiated in a sense. Um, yeah. And, and your, your guys, it's a little bit of finance, a little bit of pop culture, but I think, uh, uh, a sharper differentiation. might be something I would consider.

1:45:06We always try to tie everything into finance a little bit. With some guests, obviously it's sort of impossible and we're just excited to talk to them. But we always do generally dial it back into some form of like, where are you investing? Yes. You know, do you own equities? Or are there philosophies on business?

1:45:24Graham Stephan:Like everyone you've had on is successful in their own right in their thing. And what could we take away from that? Yeah. But it is still, you know, relatively vague. Yes. Like I couldn't tell you a specific claim like, oh, well, we want to get as many people into like retail investing as possible. I think that the finance aspect is an interesting direction. And I remember the clips that I've seen of your guises that really resonate are where you talk finances with a successful person that actually you wouldn't normally associate with finance. Like that, who was it? Togi. Yeah. Clavicular. That was our goal years ago was like, we want to break into the mainstream and make like talking about finance a more available ubiquitous thing.

1:46:07Like we wanted to have Leonardo DiCaprio on the podcast. Like this was a little years ago. Like bring on people that are celebrities, musicians, yada, yada, yada. Hey, how much do you make selling out Madison Square Garden? Like who actually gets paid out from this? Like, what are you doing with this money? Like, what are your intentions with it? Like, that's what we wanted. But it's also very difficult because like we try that. Like we'll bring you on the show and then we'll heavily debate beforehand. hey should we lead in with a question or a phrase saying something like oh robin hood moved three percent today meaning your personal wealth grew by this amount like that that is directing our audience towards that that north star but at the same time it could put you on your heels a little bit it could make it seem like we're out to get you or like we're just another one of those podcasts that want to pocket cheap yeah yeah no yeah i think you guys do it um uh yeah in kind of a a nice way.

1:46:57Um, yeah, I never felt like it was, um, like, uh, out to get me or, or aggressive. I think that there is a delicate balance, right? You want to get into deep questions that are just, you know, not what you would hear at, at other podcasts, but you know, a lot of executives are probably trained to some degree to not answer deep questions. Um, and sometimes we also forget, Right. We're also like, well, shoot, I have to say a number. If I say the wrong number, you know, we'd have to edit that out or issue a correction. So there can be an incentive to not really remember numbers. Right. Yeah. Um, but yeah, yeah.

1:47:38And, and I think, um, what I've seen other people do that's kind of interesting is real time, just like start browsing the web or show something or, you know, Hey, I found this funny tweet, pop that up, um, almost as like a visual source. And I think that can make it a little bit more dynamic, interactive, entertaining. So here's another thing, and this is by no means a pitch, but I think that so many companies could benefit so much from having an unlimited marketing funnel behind them of like organic marketing, like not paid, not just like a sponsorship, not running an ad because that appears as an ad.

1:48:18It appears as a sponsor. But like if the full power of the iced coffee hour was put behind some sort of fintech company or like some sort of, you know, huge like finance newsletter or business or platform or something like that, where consistently you have, you know, 1 billion views every year. That's also growing and you have the trust and the faith of the brand behind a company. It would be worth 20 times what we're making on an annual basis. Like, and it's not even close. You don't see companies like actually try to create legitimate podcasts. Like, for example, we talked to John Morgan about it and he spent two billion dollars on advertising this year.

1:48:58And we were like, yeah, but what about like like organic social media reach where there's more trust behind it? Like, why are companies not doing that? The overhead is it's cheap relative to everything else. It's a skill issue. That's all it is. Yeah, it's an skill issue. It's an added element of like like trust and authenticity. Yeah, I think that's right. Right. And, you know, we've dipped our toes in media as a company for a while. We acquired Market Snacks, if you guys remember, that was something like eight years ago. Became Robin Hood Snacks. And there was a podcast. Robin Hood Snacks was a podcast with Nick and Jack.

1:49:35And they later went off to, with our support launch, another thing, TBY, right? So they have a podcast now. I don't think it's as big as the iced coffee hour, but they've been working on it. We had Sherwood Media as well. I think that's evolved over time. And I think that we see huge potential in connecting our customers with really good content.

1:50:04Graham Stephan:AI is going to transform your business. Look, we've all heard this, but if you've actually rolled it out in your company, you know how this usually goes. You make the investment, everyone gets onboarded, and a few months later, no one's using it, including you. Well, thankfully, today's sponsor, Superhuman Go, is actually built the stick. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that sits right on the side of your browser, ready to help with any task you're working on. It's actually from the makers of Grammarly, and it works inside the tools and sites your team already uses. Whatever's on your screen, an email, a doc, a website, it already knows what you're looking at.

1:50:36You're not opening new tabs, pasting stuff in, or explaining yourself from scratch.

1:50:39Graham Stephan:All you have to do is ask, and it'll summarize a long email thread, draft you a reply, or prep you for a meeting without you spending hours. It also searches across all of your tools, so you're not clicking through five different apps trying to remember where something is. Plus, since nobody has to learn anything new, everyone on the team ends up using it. It's the easiest way to get AI into your business. So if you're finally done paying for tools that nobody touches, give Superhuman Go a shot. To find out more, just go to superhuman.com. Again, that is superhuman.com or click the link down below in the description to get started.

1:51:11Graham Stephan:Thank you again to Superhuman Go for supporting the podcast.

1:51:36Graham Stephan:Require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. And I don't think too many people have nailed it. I think Bloomberg has done a pretty good job of like combining financial services and data with content, media and distribution. But they've kind of been unique. And, you know, our thought is always how much of it is curated versus providing a platform for the best content from all over the world to live on Robinhood. And I think I see more potential in the latter because it's probably unrealistic for the best content to be created first party. So instead, what we should figure out is how to just empower folks such as yourselves who are basically entrepreneurs, probably don't want to work for a big company, but want to create great content and monetize it.

1:52:29How can we actually be a conduit for that great content, no matter where it's made, to find its way to Robinhood users as cheaply as possible? I think that's going to be the winning long-term strategy because we want customers to get the best content. We're unlikely to be able to employ everyone that can make it. And then we also probably, to get really good external content, don't want them to feel like we're prioritizing the editorial stuff. It sounds very similar to Elon Musk's approach of like, I'm not going to buy ads from anybody. I'm just going to make the product so loud that you can't ignore it effectively like that.

1:53:11Like people will inevitably talk about any sort of Tesla launch because it's just such like a ground breaking thing. Yeah, I think that it's simpler in many ways because you get to be a neutral platform. You can just work on building the best tools possible. and then you know i think uh it's simple to understand for creators on the platform as well whenever we're building network products which we have at least two new ones since the last time we spoke robin hood chain and robin hood social we end up you know we're thinking about how to make it as as really attractive as possible for a creator or a developer to to be on the platform and it's really just giving them the best tools, making them understand that the goal is for it to be neutral and for it to be a meritocracy.

1:54:06And there's no like hidden agenda or hidden favoritism that can tip the scales one way or another and get you demonetized without you understanding why. So it's still super early. I mean, both of these things are like month one, but yeah, we are spending more time thinking through these problems. Rapid fire questions. What do you have to say about the biggest investing myth? I think what people don't understand is compound interest. And a lot of people say, don't start investing until you have money saved up and you know what you're doing. And actually, I think it's the opposite. The earlier you start, the better off you'll be.

1:54:47So with Trump accounts, you could start at age zero. So we've taken it to its logical conclusion, which is, I think, the right place. Investing at age zero. Are you the largest depositor on Robinhood app? No. Who outside of yourself is the best product builder? I think Spotify has done a really, really nice job. Yeah, I think Spotify is a great product. I'm sure you guys would agree, but it's just... I love using it. What does Robinhood look like in 10 years if everything goes perfect? I think that Robinhood should be helping you with every investment, everything that you own, whether it be digital through our smartphone or physical.

1:55:33Maybe you'll be using our Robinhood credit card at a Robinhood grocery store. Driving a Robinhood car. Driving a Robinhood car. Maybe you'll be checking time on your Robinhood watch. On a Robinhood plane. Yes. And you'll get free burgers at our fast food restaurants. Robin Hood Wellness Centers, free cold plunge. I like that. What will surprise everybody by 2035? You know, one of the things that I'm really pushing is private markets. And I think the degree to which we can democratize that and make that accessible will be surprising to people. I mean, two hot takes. I think there will be more software engineers and more lawyers in 2035 than today.

1:56:21Okay, well, that's just dangling the carrot, huh? All right, well, you guys heard it here. We'll explore more of that next episode. Thank you so much for watching this episode. Thank you, man. Thank you to Vlad for coming on the podcast. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.

1:56:35Graham Stephan:Thank you, guys. Really appreciate it. Until next time. Until next time. There's nothing to stop some music like the word billionaire. Do you have a billion in the bank? I'm a billionaire. A real one. What was your business? I own one of the largest law firms in North America. I hunt money. I fish for money. Income and wealth disparity in the U.S. are at all-time high levels. Nobody wants to say, look, here's the real reason. I'm a lazy slug. What do most people get wrong about your business? I am the most authentic person you're ever going to meet. But I'm very, very street smart and my social IQ is off the charts.

1:57:14So how did you become a liquid net worth billionaire? If work is work, you're f***ing. I love to work. Because I don't lose. They lose. And when somebody f***s with me, I f*** back.

1:57:44Graham Stephan:You matched on Hinge. You're vibing. Then her energy completely changes. What do you do? I'm Raven Smith and I wrote and read a real love story about this exact sitch. Listen to the free audiobook now.