Robinhood CEO on stock tokenization: What people want is "capital as a service"
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Robinhood CEO on stock tokenization: What people want is "capital as a service"
The key innovation of tokenization lies in "working without requiring the company to be tokenized to opt in," which is precisely the breakthrough that Robinhood can drive.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsSource: The Twenty Minute VC
Compiled by: Ye Zhen, Wall Street Insights
In just eight months, Robinhood's market cap surged from $35 billion to $85 billion—an astonishing growth driven by the retail trading platform’s ambition to transform into a full-fledged financial infrastructure platform.
Recently, Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev appeared on Harry Stebbings’ popular podcast The Twenty Minute VC, where he laid out a bold vision for redefining the boundaries of financial services—from AI-driven operational efficiency to disruptive stock tokenization, private banking, and even cash delivery services.
In this deep conversation, Tenev revealed a core insight: what people truly want isn't complex financial instruments, but "capital as a service"—press a button, and money flows into your account.
After Robinhood launched its stock tokenization service, both OpenAI and SpaceX expressed dissatisfaction, issuing warnings to investors to "be careful." But Tenev argued such reactions are understandable yet unfair. He offered a vivid analogy: it’s like “digital NIMBYism”—in principle, everyone supports tokenization, but when it happens to them, the appeal fades.
More importantly, Tenev highlighted a fundamental issue in private markets: top-tier companies have so many options they don’t consider retail investors, creating an “adverse selection problem.” The key innovation of tokenization lies in “working without requiring the company to opt in”—a breakthrough that Robinhood is uniquely positioned to drive.
The "Not-In-My-Backyard" Effect of Tokenization: When Innovation Meets Resistance
"In principle, everyone likes tokenization, but when it actually happens to you, it’s not as appealing. It’s kind of like digital NIMBYism."
Tenev has a profound understanding of stock tokenization. He believes this technology offers two core benefits:
-
Global access: the simplest way for non-U.S. investors to gain exposure to U.S. assets
-
Democratizing illiquid assets: enabling retail investors to invest in traditionally inaccessible assets like private companies, real estate, and even art
When Robinhood launched tokenized versions of SpaceX and OpenAI, predictable resistance followed. OpenAI issued a statement warning investors to "be careful," which didn’t surprise Tenev:
"The last thing they want is someone tokenizing their stock. They don’t even understand what it is—it’s at worst a confusing distraction."
This resistance reflects a fundamental flaw in traditional private markets—adverse selection. The best companies have abundant funding options and thus ignore retail investors. This is precisely why Tenev believes tokenization must work “without requiring company opt-in.”
From Trading Platform to “Capital as a Service” Evolution
Robinhood’s business model has evolved far beyond its original zero-commission trading concept. Tenev revealed the company now has nine product lines each generating hundreds of millions in annual revenue—from options trading to cash management, crypto, and soon-to-launch private banking:
-
Stocks, options, crypto (traditional core)
-
Robinhood Gold subscriptions, cash management (sticky services)
-
Instant payouts, tokenization (innovative value-adds)
-
Private banking, prediction markets (premium expansion)
But most striking is Tenev’s vision for the future:
"People want capital as a service. If you’re an entrepreneur, you want funds to flow into your bank account quickly, with minimal friction... You press a button, money hits your account, and you get back to running your business."
The potential impact of this "capital as a service" model is revolutionary:
-
Lowering startup barriers: any-stage company can access capital quickly
-
Market-driven pricing: letting the market—not a few institutional investors—determine valuations
-
Liquidity unlock: transforming illiquid assets into tradable digital ones
AI-driven efficiency is also critical to this transformation. Tenev revealed Robinhood’s AI systems in customer support are “actually even stronger than dedicated customer support AI companies,” with nearly 100% AI adoption across engineering teams.
Redefining the Boundaries of Financial Services
Most impressive is Tenev’s approach to product innovation. From armored-truck-style cash delivery to digital private banking for high-net-worth clients, Robinhood is redefining what financial services can be.
"One thing high-net-worth individuals get in private banking is an armored truck... We asked ourselves: what would a mass-market version look like? Can we solve the problem of having to go to an ATM?"
This mindset embodies Tenev’s core philosophy: democratizing premium financial services. Whether it’s a consumer-friendly version of armored truck delivery or giving retail investors access to SpaceX equity, the goal is the same—eliminate artificial barriers in finance.
On customer strategy, Robinhood is undergoing a fundamental shift. From initially targeting millennials’ simple investing needs, it now serves both “digitally native active traders”—who “share similarities with gamers... locked into their systems with very specific demands.”
Below is the full transcript, translated by AI:
Vlad Tenev 00:00
In principle, everyone likes tokenization, but when it actually happens to you, it’s less appealing. I think it’s crucial that the mechanism works without requiring the company being tokenized to opt in. I do believe it’s a big problem that retail investors can’t access Stripe’s stock. I shared this with Patrick and John, and their response was basically: 'Oh well, we’re just a small Irish family business. Please don’t tokenize my stock.'
Harry Stebbings 00:28
Ready? Man, great to have you back. You know, interestingly, when you last sat in that chair, the market cap was $35 billion, and today it’s around $85 billion. So those eight months went pretty well.
Vlad Tenev 00:56
Was that eight months ago? Really? That’s incredible. At the time, I felt okay about it. You know, rising market cap is always good. Things get easier. You walk straighter. People listen to you. So we don’t look at—of course, that’s what they tell you; you can’t possibly pay attention—but…
Harry Stebbings 01:14
Is that the biggest BS in corporate America? You know, I’m friends with Daniel from Spotify, Spotify’s market cap is $145.4 billion, and I think he felt much better at $14.8 billion.
Vlad Tenev 01:22
Yeah, he did. I find it hard. I don’t know if other companies find it easier, but my product pushes stock price info directly into your brain, and once you use it, it’s hard to ignore. So I think it’s particularly hard for companies like ours.
Harry Stebbings 01:40
That’s the most abstract thing, isn’t it? You’re all watching Robinhood’s stock price, so I’m doing a podcast about podcasts. I just wanted to start here because it’s so crazy. I tweeted last night, saying it’s kind of like a Wall Street joke—that Robinhood’s insane rise last year. If you had to attribute it to one or two things, what do you think Wall Street now sees that it didn’t see before?
Vlad Tenev 02:03
I think we’ve been saying the same thing over the past two years, clearly articulating the strategy—it just took time to prove whether it worked. In a sense, we were lucky that a lot of things went well.
Harry Stebbings 02:22
As you think about cost stabilization / reduction, to what extent is that management efficient and simply becoming leaner, rather than introducing AI, which is the driver?
Vlad Tenev 02:32
AI is a big part of it, but I think we’ve been quite secretive about our internal use of AI. We’ve been talking about it broadly and have started rolling out AI products. In fact, our AI system Robinhood Cortex just launched to customers earlier today. But its impact on internal teams—from software engineering to customer support—massive internal teams—is enormous.
Harry Stebbings 03:06
In software engineering, Benioff said, what percentage of new code at Salesforce is AI-generated today? What do you think yours is?
Vlad Tenev 03:12
I think that sounds good. I mean, it’s hard to say for these agent systems, right? We’ve moved from GitHub Copilot, an autocomplete system, to Cursor, and now things like WindSurf—I mean, almost all code is written by AI, and adoption in our engineering department is close to 100 percent. It’s even hard to figure out what’s human-generated code. If I had to guess, it’d be the minority.
Harry Stebbings 03:51
Yes. You mentioned customer support as another major pillar.
Vlad Tenev 03:54
In terms of what we do, we’re best-in-class—we’re actually even stronger than dedicated customer support AI companies.
Harry Stebbings 04:04
Built in-house, or using off-the-shelf solutions?
Vlad Tenev 04:06
We built our own.
Harry Stebbings 04:07
Why did you decide to do that instead of using off-the-shelf products?
Vlad Tenev 04:10
First, when we started, off-the-shelf companies like Sierra were just getting off the ground. Big companies—we’re a big Salesforce customer—weren’t mature enough. So we built a lot. Then, for a company like Robinhood, a lot of the complexity is in system integration. That is, we need to pull all data to answer customer queries. And we also need to take action—like, based on your query, we need to execute something. That requires deep integration with our backend systems, and I don’t think most vendors have really figured that out.
Harry Stebbings 05:00
When Wall Street clearly appreciates the AI efficiency story for public companies, why have you stayed quiet about it?
Vlad Tenev 05:08
Yeah, I mean, we’ve been thinking about how to better tell that story. One thing we’ve been considering is whether we should host an event, like a product launch, similar to what we just did in southern France?
Harry Stebbings 05:22
The structure is there; geographically, man, why did we pick that? Let’s just pick southern France.
Vlad Tenev 05:26
Yeah, probably still going to southern France since we’ve been there before. But there are great venues there. Yeah, and I think now we have enough topics and content to discuss—this could be a really cool event.
Harry Stebbings 05:41
Will you turn your customer support tool into a SaaS product and open-source it for everyone? Revolut’s HR tool already did that.
Vlad Tenev 05:48
We’ve discussed this internally. I think the challenge is that the value lies in deep integration with our proprietary data, and I’m not sure we want to go into enterprises to deeply integrate with their proprietary data. But overall, I always ask myself: if we build a great tool internally, can we actually offer it as a service to others? Because that’s how you keep it excellent—the external pressure from customers, not just internal teams. So I’m very pro-platformization.
Harry Stebbings 06:26
Where do you feel AI hasn’t yet reached where you wish it was?
Vlad Tenev 06:30
I mean, I think hallucinations are still an issue, and there’s a lot of work to be done there. That’s actually one of the founding principles of Harmonic, a company I chair. The question is: can we design a system that, by design, prevents hallucinations and ensures every step of reasoning is logical and consistent with the previous one? So I think we need a different approach to generating AI outputs—each output checked before release, with a very clear metric of correctness. I think that would be an interesting system, and it would change everything.
Harry Stebbings 07:25
We’ll talk about Harmonic because it’s super exciting—congrats on the Series B, super exciting. Product expansion is wild. I previously spoke specifically with Neil Mather. He talked about the speed of product development. From our perspective, you started with young first-time traders, added options and crypto attracting perhaps higher-risk investors, then speculative traders and high-volume watchers. Robinhood Gold and cash management brought more…
Harry Stebbings 07:51
I guess my question is: how do you view the different customer types you serve today? Given the recent massive product expansion, how has your thinking evolved over time?
Vlad Tenev 08:02
I think a big shift is that recently we started focusing not just on millennials and Gen Z, but also on active traders—yes, digitally native active traders. It’s a very different customer type. I mean, these people—you can almost imagine they share similarities with gamers. They have screens, headsets, fancy keyboards, but they’re locked in. Locked into their ecosystem with very specific needs. They need to be on the cutting edge of tech and innovation. They care about speed; they care about latency. We really have to understand these customers to build products like our futures ladder and Robinhood Legend.
Harry Stebbings 08:50
Why did you decide to enter this market?
Vlad Tenev 08:53
As early as 2019, we realized this market was important to us, but we weren’t really investing in it. So we had this strategy: build an extremely simple, easy-to-use, zero-commission mobile app. Our target was first-time users because our argument was: first-time users benefit—they love ease of use, and if you're starting with $100, commissions are a real barrier. That wasn’t possible before. As a result, after launch, we started getting some active traders—incidentally, with high volume—but we weren’t actively pursuing this segment. Because the zero-commission value proposition was so strong, if you were paying $1,000 a month in commissions, you’d move all your complex research and trading to Robinhood. Even though Robinhood wasn’t designed for that, the value prop was strong enough. So we incidentally built an active trader business without trying, and we realized it. We thought, a large portion of our revenue—far exceeding our initial model for first-time investors—is driven by a well-defined, limited customer segment. We ignored it for a while because our previous approach worked so well. But by 2022, we realized we weren’t serving this group well, and they were actually more important because they’re resilient. Because they’re active, they have bear strategies: they stay active when markets fall; they can do multi-leg options when markets are flat. From then on, we realized we weren’t serving them well. They moved to other platforms; they grew faster than us. So we assigned some of our core engineers to make Robinhood the best platform for active traders—not just half-heartedly serving them. I think that’s actually the primary reason for our business transformation. We realized this is actually the core of our business, and we need to invest in it to have resources for everything else.
Harry Stebbings 11:21
Do you think stock memeification is good or bad?
Vlad Tenev 11:27
What do you mean by stock memeification?
Harry Stebbings 11:29
When you have something that straightforwardly grabs public attention and really captures the zeitgeist—like, I think you’re now straightforwardly putting CoreWeaves and Circles in the race, but the GameStops of the world—is that good? Because it actually brings more people into the market—they can learn; they’re first-timers—or is it fundamentally bad because, frankly, it’s exaggerated; it’s small-scale, artificially inflated—because it’s real, but not fundamentals-based?
Vlad Tenev 11:59
I think the reasons people buy these stocks are usually very different from meme coins or even GameStop in 2021. I think they have good reasons to believe these stocks will become huge industries. For example, CoreWeave is one of the few opportunities as a public market investor to really invest in AI industry growth. I mean, if you want to invest in AI as a retail investor, what choices do you have? You have Nvidia—
Harry Stebbings 12:35
AMD.
Vlad Tenev 12:36
Yeah, I mean AMD, but actually Nvidia is $4 trillion, right? Tesla, maybe AI is 10, 20 percent of the story. So below the trillion-dollar valuation, you don’t have many options. So when CoreWeave came along, it was just lower-level access to AI, and people got excited. Then Circle—you have the stablecoin industry, right? People bet it’ll be huge, and this is direct exposure to stablecoins.
Harry Stebbings 13:10
In terms of exposure, you’ve launched a very compelling new product—tokenization of private companies. Tell me about the decision behind this new product. Take me into that room—what was the discussion like? How did you decide to build this?
Vlad Tenev 13:30
Yeah, I mean, it was clear from the beginning. Actually, I wrote an op-ed in January in The Washington Post advocating for tokenization.
Harry Stebbings 13:41
You said tokenization would be the biggest innovation in finance in the past decade.
Vlad Tenev 13:46
When I wrote the column, it might not have been that clear yet. But I think tokenization has two very significant benefits. One is like stablecoins: if you’re outside the U.S., this is the easiest way to access U.S. assets, so stablecoins—outside the U.S., very popular for those wanting dollar exposure. Similarly, I think stock tokens will become the best way to invest in U.S. stocks and other assets. That’s the use case outside the U.S. Even within the U.S.—we can already easily invest in U.S. stocks through Robinhood and other platforms—there’s still a powerful use case: illiquid assets that haven’t successfully traded or reached retail investors, like private companies, real estate, even art. So I think within the U.S., it makes a lot of sense. We wanted to prove we have the technology to achieve this. Outside the U.S., it works—indeed, it does work—the rest is just details. Within the U.S., it requires regulatory clarity. We wanted to start with two companies I thought were meaningful, hard to access, challenging but highly demanded: SpaceX and OpenAI. Coincidentally, when I was writing the op-ed, I used these two as examples.
Harry Stebbings 15:30
Exactly. Now more and more LPs are calling me, asking if they can get these two tokens. Yes, so totally agree with your demand-side point. My question is, to help me understand—if it’s a token, it’s not equity, or is it an embodiment of equity? What exactly am I buying to get it?
Vlad Tenev 15:48
Yeah, I’d say it’s analogous to stablecoins. Basically, if you think about it, we put some traditional asset in a box; we tokenize it one-to-one, and then these tokens are actually placed on a blockchain where they can be traded. So for stablecoins, for example, Circle puts U.S. Treasuries and cash in a box to back freely tradeable tokens. In this way, we can offer private company stocks or other investment opportunities, because OpenAI doesn’t have stock—they’re a nonprofit—so they have profit participation units and convertible interest securities that convert to stock upon successful transition to a for-profit entity. OpenAI is especially complex, but you can think of it as an investment opportunity in an SPV, like a traditional instrument, held by Robinhood, tokenized, and sold to retail investors.
Harry Stebbings 16:50
They’re a bit upset about it. Are you surprised by their reaction? Do you think it’s unfair?
Vlad Tenev 16:58
I think it’s somewhat unfair. They issued a statement saying "please be careful," which feels a bit redundant, but I think it could’ve been worse. I mean, from OpenAI’s perspective, I understand they have a lot on their plate—they’re trying to transition to a for-profit entity. The last thing they want is someone tokenizing their stock. They don’t even understand what it is—it’s at worst a confusing distraction.
Vlad Tenev 17:33
But I’d say it aligns with their mission. Their stated mission is to build AGI and ensure it benefits all of humanity. So one way to ensure it benefits all of humanity (not just executives and wealthy investors) is to let humanity own it—and that hasn’t been possible until now. Some of the most important companies of our time aren’t accessible to retail investors, and I think that’s a huge problem.
Harry Stebbings 18:05
For the launch or messaging, is there anything you’d do differently in hindsight?
Vlad Tenev 18:09
I think there’s always something to learn. For example, I think the narrative that "it’s somehow unsafe" wasn’t great for us. I mean, if you look at OpenAI’s Twitter feed, that tweet is actually their most popular ever. It got the most likes and retweets, which surprised me. I didn’t expect it to resonate so much. I don’t know—it’s too new, I’m not sure I’d make a different choice.
Vlad Tenev 18:47
I think the issue is, in principle, everyone likes tokenization, right? But when it actually happens to you, it’s less appealing. It’s kind of like digital NIMBYism, right? Everyone says: 'Oh great, tokenization—just do it over there.' Yes, the general problem in private markets is that the best companies have many options. They can raise funds anywhere, so they don’t consider retail investors. This leads to adverse selection—basically, only companies with no other options consider retail. That’s why all previous attempts to give retail access to these opportunities have failed. So I think it’s crucial that the tokenization mechanism works without requiring the company to opt in, and I think that’s actually the innovation we’re able to drive: we figured out how to make it work without company opt-in.
Harry Stebbings 19:56
Are you worried regulators will stop this model? Because if this works, it could be your largest revenue source currently.
Vlad Tenev 20:03
I think it could be transformative. I’d say in the EU, it’s very clear—meaning, the EU has clear crypto asset regulations in the form of MiCA. In the U.S., definitely more work needed. It involves two elements: qualified investor laws and crypto laws. To truly enable this, both are needed. I believe—one reason we demonstrated this in the EU, besides enabling our EU customers to use all these amazing products—is to show the rest of the world the real value here. You hear SEC commissioner Paul Atkins say tokenization is an innovation, and the SEC must stop being a roadblock and start embracing these innovative technologies. So I think we actually have bipartisan support to improve this.
Harry Stebbings 21:05
How do you view inventory? I mean—you mentioned earlier, inventory is the gold standard. Can you bring inventory down to series level B? You know, looking at Harmonic—I know you announced a fundraise today, Perkins participated; you’re chairman—if you put Harmonic’s token on Robinhood, lots of people would want to buy it now. Would the price be that low? Where do you see the accessibility threshold for Harmonic?
Vlad Tenev 21:32
Great question. My goal is to minimize cost as much as possible. It’s interesting because we’re kind of straddling crypto and traditional finance. If you talk to people in crypto, they’ll tell you: 'Well, the future is on-chain issuance. What you’re doing isn’t ideal compared to on-chain issuance, where equity is on-chain from day one.' And I tell them: nobody cares about on-chain issuance. The only place people will care about on-chain issuance is in your head. What people want is capital as a service. If you’re an entrepreneur, you want funds to flow into your bank account quickly, with minimal friction, and I think that’s ultimately the endgame. You should be able to use Robinhood—or another service—maybe upload some information, and you’ll actually compete in the market, so the market forces you to present information as clearly and compellingly as possible. Press a button, money hits your account, and you get back to running your business. I think that’s the logical conclusion: capital is needed at all stages, but perhaps most interesting at early stages. I think if we succeed, there’ll be more startups—like, starting a startup will become easier.
Harry Stebbings 23:06
I mean, that’s incredible—it’s actually honoring the promise of crowdfunding, which it’s never truly delivered on. So I completely get it. So looking at the next 6 to 12 months of tokenization, what will it look like? Which assets will you tokenize? When? And how?
Vlad Tenev 23:21
Well, currently in Europe, fully listed are publicly traded stocks—we have about 200—every major stock is listed. So we’ll continue expanding until we reach thousands. We’ll also make private shares tradable, so we—
Harry Stebbings 23:37
Inventory—sorry, pause—when you actually look at trading volume, see where volume concentrates, why is inventory of thousands of companies important? Do you need more than 200?
Vlad Tenev 23:50
I think you never know what will become popular. Markets always have a long tail, you know, some random company has an event, it’s interesting, and we really don’t want to get into picking winners and losers and telling you what stocks to buy. We want to keep it simple—generally, if it’s listed, we want to offer it to all listed companies. Unfortunately, there are issues—stocks under earnings per share have been listed too long, some turned into scams, and I think we want exchanges to fix that. So we’ve had to deviate somewhat from that model. But ideally, if it’s listed, we just turn it on, and that’s it.
Harry Stebbings 24:42
So from 200 to 1,000, great. Anything else?
Vlad Tenev 24:46
So a few things. On public stock tokenization, the product will roll out in phases. We’re currently in phase one, where every time we mint or burn a new token, we list it on the market—Nasdaq or NYSE, the physical exchange—for trading. So every time you buy a token, a new one is minted. Phase two: we’ll put these tokens on our exchange Bitstamp, so you can trade them directly against other cryptos and dollars. That requires phase one because we need to mint enough tokens for liquidity. So phase two unlocks 24/7 trading. Then phase three: you can interact directly with the blockchain for self-custody; you can do all staking and lending—all DeFi, self-custody—and that’s when things really start getting interesting. I think crypto wallets will deliver a first-class experience for all these tokenized assets.
Harry Stebbings 25:55
Is this a billion-dollar revenue line for you? Because now you have nine products at billion-dollar scale.
Vlad Tenev 26:01
Crypto wallets were monetized only recently. I think we’ve just started monetizing.
Harry Stebbings 26:09
Looking at these nine, which one do you think is most underestimated?
Vlad Tenev 26:14
Yeah, I haven’t really thought about it that way. I mean, we break it into nine revenue streams, but I just think, you know, customers become Robinhood Gold subscribers, and once you’re a subscriber, we encourage you to use all our products and increase your average revenue per user on the platform. So you know, we do break it down by business line—we think about it—but it’s like a world map, right? What I really care about is how many customers we have, how much money they put on the platform, and whether we meet all their financial needs. I think you can slice it many ways, but if they put all their money into Robinhood, I think we’d be happy.
Harry Stebbings 27:12
Five years from now, which do you think will be the largest revenue source?
Vlad Tenev 27:17
I think crypto is interesting because currently crypto is somewhat a separate silo in the business. How we see it, the outside world sees it as a different asset class, right? It’s like, how big is your crypto business relative to your options or stock business? It’s like trading a separate asset. But what we’re starting to see is that crypto will become the underlying layer for everything, right? In a way, everything will be crypto-powered.
Harry Stebbings 27:58
What do you mean by that? Did I get it?
Vlad Tenev 28:00
Well, let me give you an example. Right now Robinhood Gold has an interest component where you earn interest on cash. Once our stablecoin launches, crypto will have that feature too—you’ll be able to earn interest on your stable assets, coin, which will be a significant business, and you might see it as part of crypto. But it’s similar to a savings account. Prediction markets—over time you’ll see overseas companies like Polymarket—a prediction market business, but also crypto-powered.
Harry Stebbings 28:40
My joy is I have no ego, so I’m not afraid to ask very stupid questions. I hung out with Airwallex’s Jack—he’s smart, one of the most underrated founders—I don’t know if you know him. He’s very pessimistic about the future of stablecoins. What’s your view on the stablecoin market over the next three years? Do you share his negativity?
Vlad Tenev 29:01
I don’t know if I’d go that far. There are definitely use cases. I mean, let me just give an example. Robinhood uses stablecoins. Our company uses Bitcoin. So we have a use case where we trade large amounts of crypto, requiring settlement with counterparties. I mean, if our customers buy a lot of Bitcoin, we need to wire dollars to our counterparties, who then send crypto back to us. Monday to Friday, during trading hours, it’s smooth—we can settle intraday—we wire dollars, they send crypto to our wallet, all good. But what happens weekends? If banks are closed, crypto markets are open, and our retail customers want to buy billions in crypto, what then?
Vlad Tenev 30:00
So you might face a tough situation because we can’t transfer funds. Then you either take counterparty risk—meaning you trust one party to eventually deliver dollars when they can, and you send crypto upfront—which is tricky because if you have many counterparties, counterparty risk compounds—or you need credit lines, right—credit lines with counterparties are expensive—or you pre-fund your bank accounts, which may differ—you know, unless you force centralization, counterparties often have different bank accounts—so you pre-fund and plan for massive volumes, which is very capital inefficient. But stablecoins—
Harry Stebbings 30:52
Hearing those options gives me goosebumps—
Vlad Tenev 30:56
None are good. You know, we had to deal with this in 2021, our solution was to raise a lot of capital and pre-fund, hoping it’d be enough, right? But now with stablecoins, we can send dollars over the weekend—they arrive instantly at our counterparties; they send crypto back—problem solved. So it’s a real use case, and it drove our adoption. So 24/7 real-time dollar flow is real, and I think you can’t deny that outside the U.S.—especially in developing countries—stablecoins have become the easiest way for retail to access dollars, and I think that’s real. They’ve basically replaced American Express traveler’s checks, and foreigners in countries with devaluing currencies hoard dollars to preserve wealth.
Harry Stebbings 31:52
Are you ready for a truly unfair trial? Let’s see. Of the nine products, all with $100M+ revenue, if I forced you today to shut down one due to focus, which would you shut down?
Vlad Tenev 32:02
Oh, good question. Well, let me tell you one I wouldn’t mind—even if it disappeared over time, I wouldn’t mind: instant payout revenue. So we make money when customers instantly withdraw Robinhood funds to their bank accounts. You know, it’s a good business for us.
Harry Stebbings 32:28
How big is that business?
Vlad Tenev 32:30
I’d say it’s nine figures. Yeah, I mean, we can verify, but I think it’s one of them—either standalone or combined with related factors. But yeah, it’s a big business. You know, our GM there is very proud of this business, hates me saying this, but I told him, 'Hey, if your business goes to zero, I won’t be sad'—because it means no one’s withdrawing from Robinhood. If it’s like everyone keeps money in Robinhood forever, we’d feel great. So one of our goals is to eliminate all reasons people want to move money to external bank accounts.
Harry Stebbings 33:10
Great answer! What a brilliant answer. It’s like in interviews when asked about your biggest weakness, you say: 'I just work too hard.' Alright, you and I have a whiteboard—we’re planning a new product.
Vlad Tenev 33:24
Blackboard.
Harry Stebbings 33:25
Please—god, I hate your store, right near school. What’s the product you most want to build but haven’t yet?
Vlad Tenev 33:33
In financial services? I mean, private markets is an area I’ve always been very interested in. I think we already have plans, and the time between ideation and launching new products has shortened a lot. I mean, if six months ago you told me I’d be embroiled in controversy for tokenizing private markets and delivering to customers, I’d be surprised, but our team executed very well. I think what we discussed earlier—still future—is offering this capital-as-a-service: press a button, money hits your account, whether business or personal, I think that would be very meaningful.
Harry Stebbings 34:34
A market no one has cracked, everyone wants—many have tried; Nick, Revolut wants this market—that ultra-high-net-worth and super high-net-worth individuals working at Goldman, Pictet, or JPMorgan. Do you want this market?
Vlad Tenev 34:49
Yeah, I think—yes, we’re interested in that market.
Harry Stebbings 34:55
How do you win where others haven’t?
Vlad Tenev 34:57
Well, honestly, I don’t know if many people have really tried hard. I mean, I think the $100K/year income bracket—is also a great market. And you might think: 'Well, why not serve those making $1M, $5M—ultra-high-net-worth?' Like, if you could actually be my family office, I think that’s an attractive proposition, and actually that’s my goal: I want to put all my personal assets under Robinhood. And I think we’re not far from fully meeting my needs—probably a few years away.
Harry Stebbings 35:42
What’s missing today that we need to meet your needs?
Vlad Tenev 35:46
Yes, private banking—by the way, we’re rolling it out; it’s moving very fast. As far as I know, it’s the first truly digital private banking product designed for… I mean, private banking has always been very physical. All features require branches; no one’s cracked how to deliver it without branches. Let me give you an example.
Vlad Tenev 36:11
Cash delivery—I don’t know if you’ve heard of this cash delivery innovation, I’m very excited about it.
Harry Stebbings 36:11
Tell me.
Vlad Tenev 36:11
One service high-net-worth individuals get in private banking is an armored truck. I was genuinely shocked, but First Republic Bank (sadly defunct now) offered this service—delivering cash to your home. You don’t go to ATMs; they offer this for large withdrawals, and cash comes in an armored truck.
Harry Stebbings 36:47
I’ve never heard of armored trucks delivering thousands in cash. I’m at Goldman—I don’t think you guys do armored trucks. Is this real?
Vlad Tenev 36:59
It’s a big thing. That’s why we liked First Republic—you know, going to banks and ATMs is annoying—much easier to have the bank deliver cash to you.
Harry Stebbings 37:11
Do you still use cash?
Vlad Tenev 37:17
For tips.
Harry Stebbings 37:19
Oh, you’re American—that’s an American thing. Why do you need $50 in cash?
Vlad Tenev 37:26
You have to tip. Lots of people serve me—you know, you have to tip each one.
Harry Stebbings 37:32
Amazing.
Vlad Tenev 37:33
My employees use my service too, they need to tip people
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
@twentyminutevc
