Robinhood CEO: Making Everyone An Owner

The a16z Show

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Vlad Tenev built Robinhood by breaking every rule Wall Street wrote: zero commissions when competitors charged $10, mobile-first when "serious" investors demanded desktop, a brand that made finance feel like rebellion instead of a club you'd never join. By 2021 they'd forced every major brokerage to slash fees and attracted millions who'd never owned a stock, but then GameStop happened: trading restrictions during the meme stock frenzy triggered congressional hearings, user fury, and a two-year brand crisis that nearly buried them despite the real culprit being antiquated clearing mechanics no one understood. Now Tenev's pushing an even more radical vision—tokenizing private company shares so retail investors can own stakes in AI giants before IPO, turning prediction markets into "truth machines" that beat polls and pundits, and building what he calls the end of financial nihilism: a platform where your seventy-year-old parents and your Gen Z cousin both manage everything from retirement accounts to election bets in one place. The question isn't whether traditional finance survives this; it's whether Robinhood can move fast enough to own the entire wealth transfer before someone else does.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's our truth machines.
0:01.3	Like we're constantly being bombarded by all this information and noise.
0:05.5	Anyone can be an influencer.
0:07.0	Anyone can have a podcast.
0:08.7	How do you sift through that and figure out what's actually going to happen?
0:12.4	Massachusetts banned their residents from buying into the IPO of Apple Computer.
0:17.9	Because it was too risky.
0:19.6	49 other states, you're okay. No n no nanny state there, but Massachusetts is, uh-uh, too dangerous. And like Apple's gone up in like billion times. And by the way, they have like one of the largest and most robust state lotteries at the same time. Which is so bonkers. There's a funny website called WTF happened in 1971 when you decoupled from the gold standard.
0:38.9	Wages were kind of stagnant, but asset prices went up a lot. If you own an asset, that's great.
0:43.5	You benefit from all of these amazing new things like the iPhone. You're now an owner. You participate in the ownership economy.
0:50.0	If you just get paid cash, and some people get paid a lot of cash. They just get left behind.
0:54.6	I think we learned a lot of valuable lessons. A simple lie is much more powerful than a complicated
1:01.5	to the group. Yeah. So yeah, the Robin Hood's colluding with hedge funds. Right. Very compelling story.
1:07.1	It's like, ah, Robin Hood, look, they're actually stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.
1:11.8	It just writes itself. Like, if I was in charge of marketing for an editor, I'd probably
1:17.6	come up with that, right? It would be a good one. If you look at AI as a category, you have the
1:23.6	fastest product adoption of any products in history. And at the same time, it's the most
1:28.3	hated category. Interview people and their perception of AI is worse than social media.
1:34.4	Because nobody's worried social media is going to take their jobs. But there's this underlying
1:38.3	fear that these companies are automating everything and, you know, where's my job in that list?
1:44.7	People are freaked out about that.
1:46.5	And I think we could figure out how to be a little bit more egalitarian in the ownership.
	...

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