"I'd say for the first three or four years since we launched to the public, the press and everything around Robinhood was pretty universally positive. It was like, you know, we're rooting for these guys. This is like new. They're kind of young. It's kind of a David and Goliath story where they're going up against these giants. So it's like, oh, amazing. Robinhood is doing well.
And then, 2019 came. So we've been live for about four years. And in this environment, we were basically just eating the market, right? If you look at mobile app downloads, we had like 60% market share. So out of every 10 downloads in the entire brokerage space, Robinhood was six out of 10.
And, you know, we had gone from a $75 million valuation in 2014. That was our series A round, to a $7.5 billion. 100x in four years.
And...a very interesting thing happened in September of 2019. Remember, this was right before COVID. All of the major incumbent competitors, within pretty much a week of each other, lowered their commissions to zero.
So they saw this and like one of them moved first. I think it was Interactive Brokers lowered the commissions to zero.
And then it was clear they all had like a playbook that they had prepared.
All of them went to zero.
I don't think anything's happen like that in business history, as far as I'm aware.
It would be almost like if all the car makers got together in response to the Tesla threat and said, we're going all electric, full bore, in the same week." @vladtenev of @RobinhoodApp
✔️“We had gone from a $75 million valuation in 2014. That was our Series A round, to $7.5 billion. Amazing, right? 100x in 4 years.” -@vladtenev of @RobinhoodApp
0:00 Vlad Tenev
0:14 The party question that started Robinhood
3:59 Stanford physics & finding a co-founder
6:19 The 2008 crash as opportunity
14:15 Navigating regulators before building anything 19:35 Three years to launch
30:20 Why your balance is front and center
33:36 How the old guard responded
58:57 Prediction markets
67:51 Tokenized stocks & 24/7 trading
78:08 Where Robinhood is headed
95:11 Making IPOs great again