The Incredible Double Interview: Superhuman and Robinhood | E2090

27:29Is this money? Is it a pitch? You tell us. And it doesn't cost any more. It's just a few more tokens. It's so funny because you understand PowerUser so well. As a PowerEmail user, a super router in the world um i create aliases so when i sign up for something that's a shopping site or i sign up for a news site i use a different email at calicanus.com i will use different emails um like calicanus at launch.co is a group email when we send syndicate emails you get the idea so i built my own little hacks to build this but man i would have if somebody could have just done this for me. That was 10 hours of my life over the last 10 years is building my own system to organize this stuff.

28:15And you've actually now built it for every user. It's so brilliant. Well, hold that thought because on a perfect segue, it's almost as if you read my mind. You can make your own custom auto labels. So I have four that I've made here. This is exactly the kind of organization you're talking about. And this is just whatever you want. I think like many people, I'm kind of overloaded with social networks and I just don't really pay attention to them anymore. The one last social network I pay attention to is Twitter or X. If you DM me, I will see it. But if you LinkedIn message me, I got news for you.

28:48I just ain't going to see it. It's just too many. Now, the problem is I sometimes receive really powerful messages via LinkedIn messages. And I just don't know which are the ones to pay attention to. The problem is it's like less than a few percent. When people in-mail me or when people send me a LinkedIn message saying they're interested in applying at Superhuman, I want to know. And you can see exactly that happened here. So this was actually marked social, a built-in auto label, and recruiting, a custom auto label. So I was like, huh, that's interesting. I'm going to go ahead and open that.

29:19Two tags. Andy, I'm a CS major graduating from UC Berkeley this May. And I opened this before to make sure I wasn't revealing anything I shouldn't. I previously entered Amazon and Microsoft. My senior thesis is on how long-form email is on its way out. Would love to hear your ideas on this, too. Let me know if you're open to a chat. Of course, I'm open for a chat. And this is something I would simply have missed before. This is the power of, in this case, combining a built-in auto label with a custom auto label. 2025 is going to be the year that voice AI really breaks out. Voice AI is going to change everything.

29:54And this technology is perfect for building a chatbot or automating customer calls and basically creating these next-gen voice experiences. But building with these tools is so difficult. It's just a bear. It's going to take your developers months to build and test anything even basic unless you use VAPI, V-A-P-I. This is the fastest and easiest way to integrate voice into your products. It's just the most simple API you've ever used. It helps you build, test, and deploy voice agents in just minutes. and you can create ultra-realistic AI voices and customizable personalities. I like that part. All with real-time response speeds.

30:34You know what'd be great? Maybe I just demo it, okay? Listen to this. Hey, Jason, it's great to be on your podcast. Oh, okay, great. Are you interested in being the co-host of the podcast? I mean, I'd love to. Just imagine the banter, AI and humans, the ultimate duo. But I think I'll stick to helping out with Bobby for now. All right. What's up in the startup world today? You know, we have so many things going on in the startup world, including AI. So I'm wondering if you have any tips for founders on how to create great AI experiences. Totally. I mean, first off, keep it simple. Focus on solving real problems for users.

31:10Then make sure it feels natural. Good conversation dynamics are key. Oh, and don't forget to optimize for speed. Nobody likes waiting for a response. What do you think? That sounds really good to me. Take care and chat soon. Gotta say, these are ready for primetime. And if you want to give it a try, you can see it works. Now you gotta give Vapi a try. V-A-P-I dot A-I. Vapi dot A-I. Use the code TWIST200, T-W-I-S-T 200, to get$200 in free credits. That's over a thousand minutes in calls. Great job to the Vapi team. Andy, I will be in touch. Thank you for the message and for beautifully illustrating this point here.

31:52Let's talk about how you can actually turn this into a stream of work that you can then work on. Before I do that, I'm even going to go back to your email and see if it worked. It did. Here's what I mean by worked. It has an auto reminder. So I did this really quickly. I should have probably slowed down. I did not set a reminder on this email, but I clearly expect a response from Jason. And reminders are very powerful in Superhuman. This is how most people use superhuman. But what if you didn't need to set them? Well, in this case, I didn't, and yet it just works. Jason, I see you opened the email.

32:27Hello, hello. Please don't reply because I'm going to demonstrate. Oh, okay. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. All good. I'm going to demonstrate what happens if you don't reply. Now, normally, this is going to come back on Friday. That is using a feature that we call auto-reminders. You can set the default reminder. This is in two days' time on all messages that need a follow-up. what I'm now going to demonstrate is auto drafts. So let's actually say I want this email to come back in one minute. And in the meantime, I'm going to go ahead and get back to my inbox over here. Incredible. If you haven't used superhuman, I highly recommend it.

33:06If you're a CEO, VC, or founder, if you spend, I would say one hour or more a day in your email box, then you qualify. If you spend three or four hours and you don't use this, well, you could gain back at a minimum, I think, 25 % of your time. At four hours a day, one hour per day is 365 hours. 365 hours is about 15 to 20 % of the work year. Imagine what you could get back if you had an eighth day of the week. Superhuman is the eighth day of a week that founders and CEOs and investors get back. How does that sound to you as a pitch if you're hearing my voice? Now, I'm not just saying this because I'm an investor in the company and it's going to return a multiple on my first fund.

33:56And if I cleared my position right now, it would. I'm not clearing my position. Stop asking me, everybody. I keep getting, this is when I know the market's coming back, is when everybody's asking me to clear my position. Speaking of never selling a share, let me bring in my good friend, Vlad, the co-founder of Robinhood. Welcome. You've never met my good friend, Raul, from Superhuman, have you? I have not, but I've been enjoying the demo. Good to meet you, Raul. Jason, always a pleasure. You saw Raul hold up his gold card. Oh, yeah. I have the gold card as well. We got to get you solid gold, my man.

34:33That was going to be my party ask. so let's just start with it. I have one ask for you Vlad. Can I get a solid gold card? So, um, is my, first of all, is mine solid gold? Let's see it. Can we, can we, do you have it on you? No, I don't have it. I gotta get up my desk. You would know if it's solid gold. you sent it to me in the YSL envelope, right? It was in a New Saint Laurent envelope and I was one of the first ones. So I would assume you sent me solid gold. If you didn't, we're going to have to have a conversation after this. No, no, we definitely, yeah, if you got, I think I managed yours personally.

35:08Raul, you must have just gotten it via being a gold subscriber. Is that right? Or did we help you with that one too? That is right. And in fact, this is, if I may pitch your product for a second, this is my first Robin Hood product. This is the thing that convinced me to sign up. I'm not the kind of person who trades day to day, but I am the kind of person who loves free money. And if folks don't know, this is 3 % back on basically everything. Uh, so I was like, sign me the hell up. It's a, it's a pretty great value proposition. Uh, Robin hood. Uh, I was lucky enough to, I always like to tell the founder story.

35:45Uh, Vlad, uh, and I, we were both in Sequoia circle or in the Silicon Valley, Palo Alto circle. I was at, uh, Antonio's nuthouse, which I think is defunct now in Palo Alto. Somebody told me it shut down. It's defunct. Yeah. Rest in peace. Very sad. So I'm sitting there with my friend Adeo and Adeo's college roommate. his name is Elon Musk and the three of us are sitting there and Vlad walks in and he's like hey you know J.K. Alba blah blah blah and he starts pitching me Robinhood and I have to say two of the stories I always tell people is how crazy both of your value propositions were how non-consensus they were bro how's this for a pitch Vlad comes up I'm a quad blah blah blah he's pitching me I want to get young people to trade stocks he said to Vlad Vlad young people you know like people who are on their parents Netflix account and live in the basement and won't buy a car and like they don't have a driver's license it's like yeah exactly those people I said okay how are you going to get them to uh start trading for their future he says oh that's the best part it's going to be free to trade I said can I repeat back to you what you just told me he said yeah I said you want a bunch of people who have no commitment toward their future to suddenly make a commitment and the way you're going to make money is by making it free he says yeah and then i have this further conversation with them and i'm like well how do you get those people he says oh we're gonna give them free stuff in a company uh you want to make it free get people who are commitment phobic and then you want to give them free shares in the company that's your plan he said yes that's my plan and i said to him i'm in and Vlad said something to the effect of like well the way you said it back to me sounded like it was a stupid idea I said no it cost E-Trade$400 to acquire a customer on CNBC I remember this because they used to advertise on a gadget and in my in my magazine back in the print magazine days if you can get them for a three dollar share you just save two hundred three hundred ninety seven dollars he's like exactly I said you know if you get this generation addicted to this product, they're going to grow up and they're going to get pregnant.

37:58They're going to get a 529. They're going to start buying mutual funds. They may YOLO into some crazy stock, but eventually it's going to happen. And you're both in the same fund. We distributed Robinhood at$14 a share, I think. And this is something with your fund, you're going to have to deal with, or you may have had to deal with when companies start going public. Have you had one go public yet and distributed a public yet? We're probably about two years away, but selling is so much harder than buying. So I, you know, at the time, the concept was distribute immediately and let people make the decision.

38:31So I sent a note to everybody. I'm not selling a share in this company. Vlad's a genius. And his partner's brilliant too. Like they know what they're doing. Don't sell. Because it was like bottom of the market, 22, I think, or something like that. You know, I said, don't sell. Then it goes up to$60. this would have been like a 5X in that fund. It was like a$50 million. It was a$10 million fund. This would have been a four or five X on the fund. Instead, the fund's five on paper, but it would be like eight or something on paper. And then four realized instead of 1.5 realized or whatever it is. I don't have the exact number.

39:07So a lot of lessons there. Never sell a share. If that founder is brilliant at product and, you know, Vlad, welcome to the program. You're brilliant at product. Well, thank you. That means a lot. Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad to hear you say that. And no worries about distributing. Even LeBron James misses an open dunk sometimes. I want to ask you, Vlad, Raul is very considered and thoughtful, and he is really focused on world-class design. You also, world-class design. What's your philosophy on product design, if you could summarize it? because Raul has been telling us a bit of his, you know, this 10X philosophy and being really thoughtful about it.

39:52Yeah. I mean, what I'll tell you is, you know, we, Beiju and I, when we started the company, we had to learn this stuff from first principles, right? And I actually learned a lot from him because in the early days, he did the design and I did the engineering. And neither of us, We weren't designers or engineers. We were both mathematicians. So we met at Stanford when we were in the physics department. And when we were studying physics, we both became math majors at around the same time. And so a lot of the skepticism in the early days was actually, you guys are two mathematicians. You're talking about building an amazing consumer product.

40:39but we don't really have confidence that you know how to do that. Like when's the last time you heard of two mathematicians building something? So that was kind of the first round of skepticism before you get even into like the fact that it's a regulated industry and the business model maybe was a little bit complex to understand how everyone else was charging$10, but we were going to offer this stuff for free. There was just skepticism about the team. and it was hard to hire as well because we were just you know starting from scratch and so uh beiju what did he do he he bought a a wacom tablet and he was sketching uh user interfaces on on photoshop and i was watching uh the stanford ios engineering courses on the caltrain at 2x speed on my way down from san francisco to palo alto that's how we learned how to do design and and how I learned to engineer consumer products.

41:38I think what was so differentiated about Robinhood at the time, Robinhood did two things well that hadn't been done before. One was introducing zero commissions and kind of proving that that could work. But the second was actually moving brokerage into mobile, which also hadn't been done. And I think we made the right bets there because zero commission ended up being the industry standard and the brokerage moved to mobile as, as primary. And actually every brokerage of consequence, every platform that lets you trade stuff had to resemble Robinhood in order to, to stay relevant. So, um, to some degree, I don't want to take too much credit over the design.

42:22I mean, we had a great team of people. um beiju obviously cared a lot about it uh i think i think we had that culture set up uh from very early but what i'd tell you is when i work with designers now and um you mentioned the gold card i think the gold card is a product that uh hopefully raul you can see there's a lot of intentionality in in the design of it not just you know the physical card itself but also the the credit card app with the way that we do virtual cards, family features, the way that like the app looks and feels. It's kind of got this monochromatic gold vibe where we try to deliver the feeling of using a luxury kind of high net worth product, but simultaneously make it accessible to the mass market.

43:14So we care a lot about this. And, you know, when I meet with our designers and creative folks, who I spend a lot of time with, I kind of tell them two things. The first thing is everyone should be a craftsman and use the tools. And the tools are so good now. I mean, you have mid-journey, design has been democratized and made accessible to a tremendous degree. And I think there can be a tendency, especially as organizations get bigger, to have your VP, your senior director, your director, passing your feedback down in a big chain. And then there's one designer at the end of it, an individual contributor who's doing the work.

43:56And what I tell people is everyone should be doing the work. There's no reason not to. I love it when my designers and creatives take out Figma or take out Mid Journey in a meeting and just start working on stuff. And I try to encourage that myself by doing it as much as possible. So that's one thing. And then the second thing is, I think one failure case is when you have big teams of people and multiple creatives, you end up getting these big meetings and you end up seeing design by committee, right? And everyone kind of like throws in their two cents of how things should be changed. and you end up getting something that doesn't offend anyone, which I think is not the recipe for getting the best design.

44:44I think the best design is opinionated. It's going to offend some people and there's going to be a lot of conflict around that. So another thing I tell people is it should be opinionated. If everyone has consensus, then we're not there. You should see it and have an emotional reaction to it. And actually, we have to figure this out. If it involves kicking people out of meetings, if it involves being explicit about like, hey, this one, I'm running with the vision, maybe this other one you should. But I think what kills great design is sort of like large numbers of people designing things by committee.

45:25And you have to fight against the grain to make it feel like a consistent, coherent vision, ideally from one person. So those are kind of the two things that I think are hard and non-obvious that I think are necessary. And I emphasize as much as I can. so i'm just gonna jump in and riff on that a little bit first of all by the way jason said you are a genius and i didn't know that you went to stanford i didn't know that you started in physics folks anyone who starts in physics and says this is too easy i'm gonna do math instead oh my god so i i was like i was at cambridge and uh i was surrounded by very smart people of course i did computer science and then the physicists and the mathematicians holy moly but then he decided, Raul, to do the ultimate boss, which is try to build a consumer product, which makes physics and computer science and everything else seem easy, because now you're into just strict art and science and alchemy.

46:29Well, you know what it turns out? It's that left brain right brain thing, which Vlad, I sense in you as well. I find that relatively easy, and maybe if you have a physicist mind or a mathematician mind, it feels that way. But Vlad, my question was going to be, I mean, you've had such a success. You've scaled your organization much further than Superhuman is right now. And we hope to be where you are at some point. How have you scaled the teaching of design? So I think we've heard things like don't design by committee, but the actual nuances of the craft and what makes Robin Hood Robin Hood, how have you taught those pieces to people?

47:08It's something that, honestly, I still struggle with sometimes and I solve it by jumping in there myself. I hired a president last year. I've gone from eight direct reports, the normal VP structure down to two. So I'm in there pushing pixels and writing copy with everybody. This is such a good question. Yeah. Professional development. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think it starts with great people, people that you trust being in leadership positions where they have influence. We've gone through this as we've grown the company and the design team where, you know, the first go around, we hired some professional managers that, you know, were kind of further from the work.

47:49But I think the balance we've reached is the people that are the best at the work whose taste we trust the most are in leadership positions. And then, you know, they're kind of pushing things forward. And you kind of supplement. I supplement that with being in meetings with them, being in jam sessions with them and meetings are not just forums where we review the work but we actually do design in meetings and actually change things um with remote it's been difficult i think i always prefer to have people in one place where we can um we can draw stuff and we can kind of go back and forth and we've done some like multi-hour half day jams in the past um but yeah it's hard for me to to to compare against other companies i've never worked at another company but um it's not a clean process it's it's it's messy i think sometimes we end up taking too long to do stuff and we redo everything and start from scratch and everyone gets frustrated so i'd always love for it to be cleaner but um i think i think rick rubin's book i don't know if you guys have read rick Rubin's book.

49:00It's very good. Yeah, I think I mean, we're in the technology product business, so I don't think we're quite there in Rick Rubin land where I mean, his thesis is like, it's good if you like it. And the artist is kind of a singular individual. I think we have to juxtapose that with it actually has to drive business results. There's metrics. It has to perform. But I think there's a lot of truth in that book. You know, it takes slowing down too, Raul. So in our venture firm, I looked at how do we get my decision-making process that led to investing in both of your companies and how do we scale it, right?

49:44And at the time, I met people through my network or I found a great product and I just emailed the person as in your case, Raul, I like to report if I emailed the info line. That was my original philosophy. um you know i i was the picker and people said oh my god you're such a great picker and that's how i went from you know being the first scout at sequoia with another kid named sam all uh he did stripe i did uber uh it's pretty funny um and then having my own fund then i went on um to really focus on building systems as opposed to just having the goal of like i want people to pick as good as me like what is the system for doing that and the system for doing that is actually understanding the founder's vision, right?

50:25And how does that occur? It occurs in a meeting, it occurs with a demo. And then I broke down, what are the items that Superhuman, Palm, Uber, Robinhood, Wealthfront, Data Stacks, Thumbtack, Athena, what were the things they had in common? And they were always, world-class design was one of the 13 attributes, world-class design. So that's one of the 13 attributes we put into our database system when we're vetting 20 ,000 applications for funding per year. Another one is product velocity. Another one is the team worked together before. Now, if you look at both of your companies, superhuman, you had people from the previous team, right?

51:04So it was a serial team and it was a serial founder. Serial founder, another one. Robinhood, not a serial founder. I don't know that you had a company before it, but you were a serial team because you had worked together. We did, yeah. Yeah, we had a company, but it wasn't venture backed and it was like a moderate failure. Great. So that counts, right? So you were a serial team, world-class design, and you had product velocity. And that last one, product velocity, if a person can release product on a regular cadence, they're going to learn so much more than other firms. And so we just slowed down and we've been working on this database and the system for, I don't know now, three years.

51:45and it went from like five attributes to 13 of why we would invest and then about 40 reasons of why not to invest. That could be minor things like there's a lawsuit, there's an accounting problem, there's a broken cap table. And those could be red flags or pink flags, as we say. But I think, Raul, building systems to have knowledge trickle down into an organization that was three people when I started, me and Ashley and Jackie to now 21, 22 people processing previously, you know, 2000 companies a year, now 20 ,000. That's the key is, can you build a system? So I wonder if you've built systems to take the knowledge and philosophy you have role, what is the system for getting it out of your head and into their hearts, you know, and into their instincts, your instincts to their heart?

52:34I think systems work well. I mean, this, this is me talking about what I know less about. Obviously, it seems easier to describe somebody else's job. But as an investor also, we have not 13 app abuse. I think we have seven or eight that we run through in our fund. I think where it gets really different when designing a product is it's so subjective. And you're deliberately, in some cases, Vlad, like you said, trying to offend people or at least make sure that you haven't created something dilute, which everyone said yes to. And it's the subjective stuff that I sometimes find hard to translate.

53:11And I can always do it in retrospect. So for example, I see a design and I'm like, okay, we're going to tweak it in XYZ way. My internal thought process is, I just know. I just know why we have to make the change. And then when the team asks me why, I'm able to rationalize it. I'm able to say, well, this doesn't line up with that, or there's not enough white space here or, you know, we can't have transitions. Everything needs to be instant, which is one of the unusual choices we've made in our interaction design. And some of those are principles, but some of those are you just know, and I'm retroactively rationalizing it.

53:48And my hope was that after 10 years of doing that, you know, you come up with 100 or 200 rules, retroactively rationalized rules. But there always seems to be a few more, some that aren't missing. And maybe we just need to keep on doing this i love the i love the transitions thing yeah i i care a lot about that uh the the engineers and design folks all know that like when i see a spinner in the app i just lose my shit i'm like how did the spinner get here i'd rather the app crash than to actually see it um but yeah i think it's the small details and one thing i'd add um we still do all hands weekly as a company where, you know, I talk in front of the company, answer questions.

54:30I don't think very many companies at our scale do it. We definitely push for that. That's every Friday you do it. You have a little wrap up. Yes. And Jason has generously volunteered to emcee my all hands. Cannot wait to come. You're emceeing my all hands in April or possibly earlier. Cannot wait to come and meet everybody and tell them some of the historical stories. Let's talk about feedback. feedback to over-index on feedback to ignore when do you over-index how do you collect information how do you let's start with how do you collect information what do you over-index on what do you what do you uh you know de-index what do you what do you you know uh what's the word here over-index on and maybe dismiss so we really over-index on actual feedback from customers both quantitative, like you're looking at the data of them using it and where they're dropping off, and qualitative, where we put prototypes or actual working product in front of customers.

55:33UX research we did and we continue to do very early. What do I under-index on focus group style settings where you're asking people if they would use a certain product if only it existed or if only it had some feature that you're kind of describing generally. I think there's so many times where someone will tell you they'll use a certain product, but they wouldn't actually do it if it came down to it. What people say that they'll do doesn't always match up with what they do when you've got the product in front of them. So I think you have to be careful in some sense with focus groups and with people going over prototypes or value props.

56:21Open-ended feedback can send you on a random side quest and the person would actually never use the product. And it's almost better to just build a prototype and actually have somebody use it or look at the data. Yeah, I agree with that. What do you think of getting feedback, Raul, and then over-indexing and ignoring? Well, as you know, I'm very opinionated on this topic. Yes. I have written and talked about it extensively. If folks want to see that, check out Superhuman, How We Built a Product Market Fit Engine. It's on First Round Review. I believe it is the most shared article of all time, which I'm very proud of.

57:03I'll do a very quick summary. It's quite detailed. But the quick summary is, this is really hard, especially when you're in the earliest stages of an application or a company, you're trying to find products market fit. The risk is that even if you listen to your users or your customers, that it will give you a very kind of muddy, dilute view of what they want, because they all may want different things out of your product. a really old-fashioned example but this is the one that i originally read over a decade ago is uh hopefully some folks remember that paypal started as a mobile way to transfer money as opposed to a web way to transfer money imagine you're pulling those two groups of users that's going to give you two completely different sets of feedback and if you just start acting on it let's say in in a numerical order you're going to end up building sort of a very messy muddy products that lacks coherency and vision.

58:02So what do you do? Well, there's this guy called Sean Ellis who actually coined the term growth hacker. And he found that if you ask people a very specific question, how would you feel if you could no longer use the product, give them three choices, very disappointed, meaning they love it, somewhat disappointed or not disappointed, and measure the percentage that say very disappointed, meaning they love it. If you find that you get 40 % or more people saying that, you have early product market fit. And he found that those companies, this is benchmarked against hundreds of benchmark startups. Those companies almost always find their way to at least some degree of success, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of success.

58:39So what I did was I took that and built this algorithm or an engine around that to try and figure out who do you listen to. Added a few more questions. question next is who do you think this is best for how can we improve the product for you and um what do you think the main benefit of the product is the main benefit is super important so we asked this in the early days of superhuman and obviously predictably we got all kinds of answers but there was a contingent of people who were saying the main benefit is speed keyboard shortcuts focus design aesthetics ultimately it's speed like this thing that's just really really fast And if at the time I told you, yeah, I'm going to build an email app and the core value proposition is going to be speed, then Jason, you were like, okay, fine, I invest.

59:26But most people were like, no, that's a crazy idea. Yet here we were with our customers, some of them validating that. Now, the key thing is, and this is hard to do, but discard, ignore the feedback from all the people who said the key value proposition, the key benefit of the product was not speed or whatever the main one is in your case. And by doing that, you can focus on the people who really get your vision. Now, there's more nuance, there's more detail, and you can actually turn this into a metric that you can optimize over time. But that is my quick summary of the method. Can I ask you a couple of questions?

1:00:03I went through the process to attempt to onboard to superhuman as uh as i was on my way over here and i noticed something which i'm sure uh based on what you just said you have a very uh nuanced take on and it's subscription gating right so a lot of products they put the subscription gate uh in different parts robin hood has a subscription element to robin hood gold as you know i noticed with superhuman the subscriptions like right out front you you basically can't even see your email unless you already sign up is that something you guys tested or was it that way from the beginning oh yeah i did i did actually tell him the story this is the this is what i knew i invested in the right guy yeah okay so um so a little little bit of context and a little bit of history then to make the story make sense we used to onboard every single person in person.

1:01:00And I did the first several hundred myself, including Jason. And the very first thing I did when I sat down with Jason and all these other folks was, so as a reminder, this is a paid product and no one gets it for free, especially not investors. That's how I'm going to keep us intellectually honest here on your feedback. And he was like, what? And I was like, yep, time to pull out your credit card. Here's a little strike payment form. but it didn't please and i sat there watching him his credit card i did that hundreds of times it was so great what can you imagine you're the first investor in the company he's it's a year later and he's finally ready to show it to me or whatever was six months later like i think we were at cyclist getting espresso or something in san francisco and he's like okay uh so you log in and like i'm over the shoulder and he's like okay now you take out your credit you put it and I was like yeah okay so yeah how do I skip this and he's like no no you actually put your credit card in it's a dollar a day it's 365 days you know and I'm like it's kind of expensive I was like you know what moment of truth this thing better save me a f***ing hour a day on my email and it did but this is such a great onboarding device and now so many founders Vlad come to me and Raul they come to me and say we're doing the Raul onboarding and this is when you know you've hit a product note people will say we're robin hood for x we're superhuman for y and then if they can drill down and they know the product technique like we're doing the give to get from dropbox or uber you know or the you know what vlad did with with uh shares which by the way i broke the give to get share thing did you know that vlad you got to you maxed it out i maxed it out because i would tweet hey if you haven't tried robin hood it's f***ing fantastic to whatever, quarter million people, a half million people.

1:02:53And when that happened, I would get a hundred shares. Now these were like, you know,$3,$10 share. When I hit, I think 250 or 500, I sent you a note. By the way, I broke the system. I guess there's a cap and the cap was you could only get paid for 500, which I think was because people were hacking the give to get system. So let's shift the discussion to acquiring customers. What role have you done to acquire customers? What's been the most effective? What did you think was the most effective and didn't work? And how do you think about customer acquisition costs broadly? Super important question.

1:03:27So in the early days, we had three pillars. And I always believed these pillars would work for us. Number one is virality. Number two is PR. And then number three was thought leadership. So when it comes to virality, this is probably the least surprising, but with email one of the most effective. Email is one of the last few truly viral places where you can build a product. and it's the obvious stuff like for example sent by a superhuman which i think 30 40 percent of our users actually have on we've sent many many hundreds of millions of maybe even billions of emails with that in it and to this day it still drives between 30 and 50 percent of site traffic depending on the month so that actually still works surprisingly enough um but then there are some less obvious things so like with uh robin hood like with many companies one of the biggest flywheels for driving users is just users inviting other users.

1:04:28Whether it's to join their team or to be another individual subscriber. Here's the thing. As an email app, we get to literally send the email as the user. We punch through Priority Inbox, we punch through Focused Inbox and Outlook, we're right at the top of the other person's inbox. That is so slick. Yeah, so slick. Because the from, just so founders who are listening understand this, because the from is not from Robinhood or from Superhuman. It's from that actual customer. You know, they are obviously friends with the person. So it goes straight through. It's so brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

1:05:07So that was pillar number one. Pillar number two, I think I said was - PR. PR. Yeah. So this is sort of generic advice, I think, for every founder that I give at the early stage, which is depending on your industry, something will happen that is really news and noteworthy at some kind of a cadence in the email industry it's like you know maybe once a year there's some interesting email thing is going to happen and i remember it happened relatively early in superhuman folks may remember the app mailbox and that was a hundred million dollar acquisition by uh by dropbox and they they popularized swipe to archive like a really really great innovation didn't exist before that believe it or not now every single app has that, obviously.

1:05:49But Dropbox acquired them, and predictably, but sadly, a year and a bit later, they were shut down. I'm not going to get into the reasons why, but they were shut down. But I could see it coming a million miles off, and I was like, aha, this is my moment. Everyone is going to cover this very, very sad outcome, burning of$100 million, and then that itself is going to start to trigger mainstream media to start writing about email all over again. And this happens once every few years. This is my time to shine. So I was like, okay, what do I have that is personally relevant to this story? Well, I sold an email company, but I sold my last one for 15 million.

1:06:26So no one really cares. It's really tiny. That said, I worked at LinkedIn for two years. And I think I have an extremely detailed and nuanced view of how to make an acquisition work really, really well. And even today, Reportive is still alive. It's part of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. And for an acquisition to have survived 15 years is just super rare. So I know how to do it. I sort of created the foundation and the framework for that to work. So what I did was I wrote what is to this day still one of the most shared articles on how to survive an M &A transaction. And not just how to survive it, but how to thrive in one and how to make a real impact at the acquirer.

1:07:07And so I just piggybacked my article on their news. And that drove many tens of thousands of new signups to Superhuman. Tens of thousands. This is interesting. There's actually a term for it. When I was a journalist, they called it news hijacking. And the PR industry now, it's kind of part of the playbook. You can get pulled into it, as Vlad did, inadvertently, you know, without doing it. Or you can do it actively. You can do it passively, as Vlad did. We'll get into that story in a moment. Or you can get, you can do it, you know, deliberately. And you see this now where people are like, oh, if you're talking about, you know, Doe, I have an expert at doing zero-based budgeting from the accounting firm of Lux, Lux, and Lux, and they can comment on it.

1:07:55And, you know, there's like helper reporter kind of services. Vlad PR played a major role for Robinhood at various points, also for Uber. And sometimes even if it's, you know, the bad press is good press kind of situation, the number of signups for uber every time something went wrong in an uber you know an uber accident uh you know anything even with the company the i mean i don't i gotta say this um judiciously but no matter what happened it moved uber up in the app rankings the number of people signing up for uber on a bad news day when everything was chaotic were the record days vlad do you have any experience in this regard i do several and by the way i just want to just want a plus one mailbox mailbox uh maybe maybe you guys know this but inspired the initial robin hood waitlist we had close to a million people pre-launch sign up for robin hood and we introduced a mechanic where if you invite someone that joins the wait list and they accept, you get priority.

1:09:08So it was a prioritized queue where if you invite successfully someone, you get bumped ahead. Oh, right. I remember that. We talked about that when you were here in 2017, one of your first appearances, you talked about that wait listing and somebody productized that, I think. There's like a product you can buy now. instead of having metrics yeah branch that was that hack yeah they they came uh later and they told me hey the the Robin Hood wait list was uh inspiration for for our company which I thought was amazing I'm sorry your question was PR so I plus one on virality um yeah PR um yeah I mean I I think that just building the motion and knowing um how to do it it's it's earned media Right.

1:09:55So you don't have to pay. It's not like paid ads. And I think that I'm not sure how much it moves the needle quantitatively when you're at large scale. But there might be some correlation where, you know, founders that go and get press just tend to be founders that hustle anyway. It's like I got to get users, get me users however I can. Virality. I'm going to email everyone I know. I'm going to email all the reporters I know. You just try everything. And eventually, by the nature of trying a lot of things and being relentless, even if a small percentage of those things work, if you're just moving faster and iterating, it'll work quite well.

1:10:40We did have a lot of learnings in PR. Maybe you're talking about the whole GameStop thing. But even before then, like 2019, I remember this crazy thing that happened. We went viral on Reddit because there was a trader on WallStreetBets that discovered the infinite money, the Robinhood infinite money glitch. I don't know if you guys remember hearing about this. I remember this. Yeah, the money glitch. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, he posted a video of him screencasting his infinite money glitch. And of course, you know, the team at Robinhood was like freaking out. It's like, how many people do we have exploiting this?

1:11:21We got into action immediately. We were, um, we were, we were like making plans to close the loophole, look at all other types of loopholes. And it was a trivial number of people that actually went through with it, right? Maybe like dozens or, or something. Um, so it didn't end up being a thing, but everyone saw on Reddit and the internet that Robinhood had an infinite money glitch. and they were like, oh, I can make infinite money using this app. And so growth basically spiked up just from that. So, you know, we were terrified of this thing and then it just ended up, you know, benefiting us in all sorts of strange ways.

1:12:06Let me drop you off, Raul. This has been amazing. What a delight to have you both. And then Vlad, I'm just going to ask you a couple of questions about Robinhood as we wrap here. Yeah. Thanks again, Raul. Great to meet you, Raul. yeah i'll hit you up about the gold card and uh jason thank you so much for having me again i'm gonna finish my onboarding this is great uh i'm gonna have i'm taking you both out for a steak when i'm in san francisco well this will be to to be continued this uh little trio here hey vlad i wanted to talk to you just about the swings and the value of the company and running a public company that goes down to like i think i bought more i tweeted it the other day you know i'm just such a fan of the product i make my decisions based on product you know founder and customer and i love that you haven't sold a share i mean why sell a share in something i think 10 years from now will be worth 10x like i think that you will be a trillion dollar company eventually i'm not i'm talking my own book here but it's a fraction of my overall you know net worth so like i don't want to make it into bigger than it is and i don't like to pump stocks or anything but when i make a decision to own a company like berkshire hathaway you know and warren buffett has a thesis my thesis is the team the product the customer here you got a team that i've always believed in that has executed at a high level since day one you have a product that if you use it you know it's delightful and best in class and then you have third a customer base that is growing and loves it you see that from the hood conference you're doing but there is a reality when this company went public i think he went 67 dollars a share then during this down uh draft uh and Silicon Valley Bank going down.

1:13:42It went down to maybe$9 or$10. I bought more shares in the company when it was at$10 on my Robinhood account. And here we are. It goes back up 40, 50, 60. I don't look at it day to day. I look at the trend of, hey, the revenue is great. Customers are great. But you have to run the company through those things. How do you stay even keeled? And what do you focus on every day when the company has shifted in value by 6x in the last three years i think it's 6x try to peak it's obviously much easier on the way up than the way down uh just psychologically uh for folks right like the volatility is not the same on the way up everyone's feeling good and you know what i worry about there is complacency right it's like you think you're winning because the number is going up and then the conditions of being too complacent and actually set up the scenario where if you're not careful, it could go back down again because you've got your foot off the gas.

1:14:44So I always try to temper. I mean, I think it's good to reflect and celebrate and actually see that we've been making progress or getting rewarded for the progress, but also temper that with an understanding that we've got a lot of work to do and the job's not finished. The job's not finished. You got to keep going. Yeah. That's the Kobe line, right? Job not finished. yeah why would i be happy i love that quote um and kobe is just is he is he like an inspiration for you you you're a kobe guy 100 yeah i was i was fortunate enough to meet kobe at uh an nea event when uh yeah i think he came to sausalito at the cavallo point and you know we were we were uh i think maybe a series c stage company this was back in 2017 and beiju and i had a meeting with him a business meeting and of course i just wanted to talk about basketball i was i was a huge fan and i was like what's what's gonna happen to lebron he said lebron's gonna go to the lakers inside information he had the trade ready to go he knew he knew it he knew he knew lebron was going to the the the lakers so um i mean there's chris sacca had a meeting with him and he talked about it and it's so sad that he passed away so young because he wanted to make his third act being an investor in companies and technology and company formation and he was around the basket applying his same discipline from what i understand to learning our craft in the way that he you know approached basketball and there are these amazing stories of people like he would invite them to a workout at 6 a.m so people would be like oh shit i gotta work out with kobe let's get there at 5 30 they would get there at 5 30 and kobe would be sitting there having breakfast and be like oh drenched in sweat and they're like yeah he had his first workout at 4 a.m yeah it's 5 30 he's having breakfast and you're coming to the second workout mofos this is and he saw people there was this other one they were coming back during the dream team and they're coming back into the hotel they went out to a club and it's 4 a.m and they're coming back to the club he didn't go to the club he was leaving the hotel to go to the gym and they're crossing in the lobby and this is in the offseason and the people wonder why this guy just was such an incredible winner it just all had to do with effort you know technique effort strategy all of it philosophy and the systems he built right the system he built for success well you know was studying the game right he studied it and he was hard you know like and when you play with dwight howard you ever see that where he calls dwight howard soft he was super frustrated by shaquille o 'neal's preparation for games and And he was super upset about Dwight's because sometimes the big guys in basketball, they fall back on their size, right?

1:17:30That physical attribute is what they fall back on. He didn't have that. He was 6 '7 or something. So he had to actually go with technique, not being 7 '1. Tell me about the desktop product. This seems like you're like, I think most people who do desktop use Bloomberg or Interactive Brokers or something like that, right? These are like the super pros. But you started mobile first and now you have the desktop up. How is it doing? What percentage of people use it? Why do this now in year 10? Tell me about the thinking and how it's going. Yeah, yeah. It's going well. We announced at our last earnings call, the Robinhood Legend, which is our first desktop product built specifically for active traders, was already at$50 million in revenue run rate.

1:18:11And it's after basically two months of being out. What does it cost? It costs nothing. No additional cost. So 50 million has been generated in trades from it or revenue from it. Yeah. Yeah. And that's basically just the transaction revenue. We're not even counting what may be incremental margin revenue or interest. So yeah, we feel pretty good about that number. And obviously, if it's that way after two months, it's on its way to being 100 million business in and of itself. And I call them cylinders. We went from each$100 million business line. I like cars, so it's a cylinder for us. So now we're a nine-cylinder engine.

1:18:56When we went public back in 2021, we had maybe three cylinders, something like that, options, crypto, equities. So the business has gotten much more diversified. In 2021, we look back at the initial euphoria after we went public. It was a little bit of a weird IPO. Our stock actually went down on IPO day. So it was kind of a stressful day for me. And it went up, as you mentioned, to the 70s the week after. Yeah, it never felt real. I mean, I felt very fragile in a sense because I didn't feel like I had earned that valuation at the time and the business wasn't diversified. It was very much relying on a zero rate environment.

1:19:39And so you ask about the peaks and valleys. When we went through 2022, the higher rate environment, the business normalizing us having to adapt to not having easy money, not relying on that. It was very painful at the time, but it actually planted the seeds for us diversifying the business, becoming a stronger company, getting the team in a much leaner, better shape. And it sort of like set up the foundation for us to be successful last year and so far this year. If you think about it, you know, in this basketball analogy and as a player, you know, the big men, Shaquille O 'Neal, you know, they rely on their dominance in the paint because of physicality.

1:20:20okay, that's one dimension. But if Shaquille O 'Neal became a decent free throw shooter, given the amount he had fouled, he would have been even more dominant. He never got that right. And now you watch today's game, you have somebody like Porzingis, Kevin Durant. Jokic. Jokic. And Carl Anthony. SGA. Carl Anthony Towns on the Knicks. Carl Anthony Towns on the Knicks is a four or five. He's playing a five right now. He's the greatest big man shooter ever. I mean, his shooting percentage from three was like over 40%. For much of the year, this year and so when you have a big man imagine if shaquille o 'neal hit a three and then you start thinking about two-way if you can defend and they you know they call them what three and d's you know people can hit threes and who can also defend on the other side you're starting to get these players and and then assists come in and you got big men like yokage uh who can actually pass and it's like whoa wait a second yokage averaging a triple double as a big man i mean i think uh i was reading somewhere that Jokic statistically is having the best season ever by any basketball player this year that's crazy and then yeah you look at the guy and his physicality compared to LeBron compared to Kobe you know maybe he's even got another card he can turn over which is imagine if he had LeBron support staff with him and he physically if he got jacked if he got jacked I mean I'm not saying he's a doughboy or anything like that but people do say that like my god look good to me doesn't look like a basketball player i mean if he if he gets physically dominant oh my god he will be the best player in the history of the league it would be absolutely crazy so and you know it's interesting i saw this as well with uber um when they had the eats business and then covet hit you know rides goes down eats goes up totally yeah yeah and now you're resilient what happened to airbnb or brian you know god if we had brian chesky on this with me you and raul Can you imagine?

1:22:13I mean, he's another master of, you know, just this whole alchemy of like figuring out product and how to run and scale a company and how to do the finance part. What an amazing, you know, journey they've had because he overstaffed a little bit like you did probably. And then he cut and cut and got it really tight. He does his two cadenced product releases a year. But man, when they hit COVID, he told me on this very program, like he wasn't sure about the future of that business. Like they went to zero revenue. Can you imagine going to zero revenue? Now, the one thing they had in their favor was they were asset light.

1:22:48They didn't own the properties and people have pushed him to start owning properties or having exclusives on properties and he never did it. So they didn't at least have the hard costs of those things. But what do you think of Airbnb as a business? I mean, like his headwind became a tailwind pretty quickly because actually I'd say, you know, back then March, 2020 hit. And everyone was freaking out. It was like shelter in place. Don't leave your house. But then by, you know, by May, everyone was like, I'm kind of tired of being in my house. I mean, we did this. We're like, can we shelter somewhere else?

1:23:27And I think Airbnb became suddenly very, very attractive. Right. So that's so interesting, too. He turned the lemons into lemonade because we went from you can't leave your house to you can leave your house. You can get on a plane, but you can't. You can only have this many people at the house. So you got to make a pod, right? What do you think of all this Doge stuff? I'm curious because you had to, what was the peak employee count? And when you did your reorg, what did you get to? And then when you look at what's going on in Washington, what do you think? So I think our peak employee count was probably end of 2021.

1:23:55We were at about 4 ,000 people and we got down to maybe a little bit over 2 ,000. So yeah, it was large. What was the difference between the two staff sizes? Some people report that things are more efficient when you have less. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we saw that directly. And at that time, we also reorganized the business. I went to GMs and business leaders who were owning their P &Ls, but we moved much faster. We move much faster now. And I think the reality of it is it happened during COVID. End of 2019, I want to say we were under a thousand people. We quadrupled basically during COVID. These people hadn't met each other in person.

1:24:38They were just on these Zoom calls. So there were a lot of confounding variables that I think would force us to not work particularly well together. So we ended up reversing all of that. And, you know, you see the product velocity, the accountability, the performance of the company. We had to learn how to do this, but it's true what they say. I mean, I think that the company was frankly overstaffed and we got ahead of ourselves. We got, we got too loose. We were always a very lean company and we, we, we, we always strived to do more with less when we were private and we got a little bit away from that.

1:25:15So when I think about the federal government and I've got a lot of friends that work at the federal government, you know, I'm in DC right now. I grew up here and, you know, they're very nervous right now as they should be because they, they see what's happening. But I think it's tough medicine. The country needs it. I think the deficit's the biggest problem that we have right now. And I'm glad that the administration recognizes that. And it seems like the people are behind it. I think that, you know, it's the medicine's going to go down tough. But I think there's so much waste that... Pretty clear.

1:25:49You know, anytime you have... Yeah, there's so much that needs to be cut. You're a nimble startup and you had waste, you know? So if you can admit it, I think we can admit it in the government. Let's end on crypto. We went from a regulatory environment where, you know, Gary Gensler was like, we have a playbook here. We got rules here. Follow the rules. Seems reasonable in some ways. But the truth is, these things, when you say crypto or a person says crypto, not you specifically, but when a person says crypto, that can mean a trading card in NFT. It could mean a DAO, a group of people investing money together, i.e.

1:26:22like a venture firm. It could mean a meme coin. it can mean a utility token that gets burnt as you do usage man there are so many different ways you know that uh you could be involved in this so what should happen in crypto what would you like to see because you have people trading on your platform what would be a reasonable solution to what feels like to me we had no rules so it was too hot then we had you know follow the existing rules too cold now we're back to too hot in my opinion with like the the Malay coin, the Trump coin, whatever, you know, probably need a little more reg. What should David Sachs do?

1:26:59What should the future be? How should the SEC look at this? And what would you like to see? Because you were directly impacted by it. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what I'd love to see is there being a path to use crypto for securities, for real world productive assets that generate revenue. I wrote an op-ed that was in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago. And my argument was, there's a lot of criticism, skepticism around crypto, because all people are seeing are Bitcoin and meme coins right now. The reason for that is we're not actually allowed in the US to connect crypto to things of value.

1:27:38So of course, the easy things that regulators pass through are meme coins. And nothing wrong with meme coins. I think those are very, very interesting. But what I'd love to see is crypto technology being applied to making it easier to invest in startups, eventually public stocks as well. The traditional financial system should move onto crypto technology as the next layer of infrastructure beyond cloud. I think that's going to be a huge thing. We see the value of both because we have a large-scale crypto business and a large-scale traditional assets business. Crypto business is over an order of magnitude less expensive to run because a lot of the central intermediaries like clearing houses, settlement, transfer agencies, those are all done by software on the blockchain.

1:28:28And it's simpler to operate and you can pass on the savings in the form of better prices and also better user experience for customers. Crypto runs 24-7 by default. There's fractionalization by default. I don't even want to begin to tell you how hard it is and how much we've had to work to get to 24-5 trading on equities with Robinhood 24-hour market and how complex it is to make fractional shares for something like Berkshire Hathaway A shares happen. These are some of the most difficult engineering challenges that just happen for free in using crypto technology. So you mentioned startups there.

1:29:12I'm a big fan, as you know. I invest in 100 startups a year. I have the largest syndicate in the world, 11 ,000 accredited and qualified purchasers. I'm glad to be on your show because hopefully, I'm assuming this means we're still a startup, which I believe we are. you have the startup mentality and never lose it because that's how you succeed only the paranoid survive and you got to keep focusing on product team and customer those three things you make it work tell me what your vision is for robin hood users doing what i do every day or maybe participating in my syndicate if i had a great company like superhuman yeah and i wanted to share with the robin hood user base is is that are you and i going to be uh collaborating on something like that eventually?

1:29:56Yeah. I mean, I would love that. I mean, I'll tell you this, you look at what our customers are investing in right now and what they're interested in investing in. It's very clear. We actually publish it. Tesla. I mean, I think back since 2019, Tesla was the most commonly invested in name on the Robinhood platform. It was number one. Before then it was Apple because, you know, Apple was the most innovative company back when we started Robinhood. It was sort of in the wake of the Steve Jobs era. So it was Apple for a long time. And then it became Tesla. Recently, it's NVIDIA. So Robin users love Elon Musk companies.

1:30:29SolarCity was very, very popular on the platform before it folded into Tesla. NVIDIA is very popular now. They're investing in electric vehicles, quantum computing, AI, which the proxy is NVIDIA there because there's really not that much in the public markets that can give you AI exposure. SpaceX would clearly be very, very popular if available, right? I mean, our customers love Elon Musk. They love Tesla. It's hard for me to imagine that, you know, SpaceX would not do well. And there's not too many opportunities to invest in AI in the public markets. Open AI is still private. Anthropic is still private.

1:31:09I think those would do very well also. So, yeah, and I think I think it's interesting. So the retail angle is obvious for me. Why is it interesting on the other side for the startups and companies? So I think for late stage companies, it's useful because the employees want the liquidity. Some of them have been around for a long time. The employees are actually motivated to to sell some of their stock and take some chips off the table. Do that, you know, as programmatically already. SpaceX, I think, does it twice a year. Stripe does it once a year. and they have a very orderly process to you know let people cash in some chips and i think they even do it on a certain percentage so if retail wanted them and there's like some destiny etf or something that yeah popular because it owned some spacex and i don't even i had the founder on here i don't think they even was it might have been their largest holding because of the valuation but it's not like they at time i don't think they had a very cheap price on spacex they had bought it at a very high price and people want it so bad that they found a way because consumers are smart, like you're saying.

1:32:13That ETF ran up, right? That ETF ran up that showed you some of the demand. Yeah, that showed demand. Yeah. Not logic, but demand. So I do think later stage post-IPO founders and management teams of startups aren't super motivated to do it because in a sense, you start competing with the startup itself for primary capital. So I think the employees at that stage are kind of the stronger pull for the other side of the market. On earlier stage, the entrepreneurs would love to have that product. I remember when I started Robinhood, we had a hard time raising capital. I mean, you were an early backer, but we didn't have that many believers in the early days.

1:32:56And you could get Robinhood stock, you could invest in Robinhood on angel list at a 10 million valuation cap. And we pitched so many individual investors who were just, you know, normal people who'd worked the job, built up a nest egg, retired there to live in the Midwest. And we pitched them just like we pitched every VC and everyone who was interested, we gave them their allocation because we just, we had to take what we can get in those days. So, you know, you're passing the cup around, just trying to make enough to get the company off the ground. Yeah. And we had, um, I think Thumbtack was 5 million, Uber was 5 million and Superhuman might've been 10.

1:33:34Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. And I imagine if we had an easier way to just tap a button, you get access to global liquidity, and retail gets access with appropriate guardrails and disclosure to early stage opportunities. As an early stage entrepreneur, getting my venture off the ground looking for capital, that would be a great product offering. I am super excited about it. My best piece of advice to the SEC, I've made it clear to a bunch of my friends over there, create an accreditation test. And I use the example, when you go into Robinhood, if you don't understand options and puts and these more elaborate devices, not just buying and selling a share, but shorting it and doing options trading, you do such an amazing job walking people through an education.

1:34:20Now, you don't have to do that, but you do it. What if in the United States, just like you have to have a license to be a barber or a license to own a gun or a license to be a teacher or even drive a car and these tests are different. We should just have, and the SEC has been mandated this, they've just kind of slow rolled it and they're slow walking it, just a three or four hour course on private company investing and interesting nuances to that diversification and preferred shares versus common shares, all that stuff. And you just take a 50 question test. The test could be 25 bucks. You could have the test in Robinhood.

1:34:56You could have it at the SEC's website. You could do it any number of ways. And you have to take a course that would be free online, or you could take it in person for a hundred bucks. Man, this would be so perfect, wouldn't it? My take on that is, I think it would be odd if the friction to investing in a company like SpaceX, for example, is significantly higher than investing in a meme coin it's like you you have to pay you have to take an accreditation test yes because spacex is is risky and you have to know what you're doing but you know i would like to have it for both like and i'm talking like man when i took a firearm test in california was like what's the best way to hold a loaded gun and it was like point it in the air point it at the ground point it straight in front of you or have it in the holster or on the lockbox.

1:35:43And it was like, hmm, it was like the silliest test ever. Yeah. I think there's a lot of solutions. And I think we're excited to be kind of deeper in that discussion. I think that platforms can do a lot here to put private companies in different tiers. For example, some companies have audited financials that are public company quality, and those should be in a high tier, where they provide a lot of disclosure. And then some don't do anything. And maybe you put like a skull and crossbones and big warnings and say, this is like incredibly risky. Kind of like meme coins under it. Right. I mean, it's kind of like you have pink sheets and penny stocks right now that really don't have the same type of reporting requirements.

1:36:27So yeah, I'm more in the favor of like self-certification and really accurate labeling of what type of disclosure the company. If you're a freedom loving person, you want people to do whatever they want with their money, whether it's Vegas sports, crypto stocks, you know, cause you get educated. And this is what I always told people who criticize Robin hood. Oh, people are gambling, whatever. It's like people are gambling like a third of the country does sports betting. I bet on every Nick game using prize picks. I love it. It's my right to do that. I know that I might lose money, but I enjoy putting a hundy or five hundy on the game.

1:37:02It makes me more engaged. It's fun for me, my choice. It's American. It's American. That's what America is all about. Yes. And the only thing we need to do is disclosures. That's all. Some simple disclosures, some simple education. Vlad, wonderful to have you on. Thanks for taking the time, my friend. I look forward to coming to your all hands. And I will be there for the hood conference next year. Great job. All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning in to the greatest startup podcast in the world this week in startups. What an amazing episode. I think we got to release this one as a one-parter, just Raul and Vlad.

1:37:36Man, this could be something. Having those two overlap was spectacular for me. And as we were mentioning with Rick Rubin's book, Make the Art for Yourself, this is an example of art for me. That was so engaging. I didn't want to hang up the phone here. We're two and a half hours into this program. So what an amazing episode, a long one and a great one. And if you're listening to the audio feed, please, please go to YouTube and watch Raul's demos and you can get a vibe for everything, go to our YouTube channel. I think Spotify has video as well. So you can get it there, but please go to YouTube and sign up.

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