YouSaid · the spoken record

Vlad Tenev

lines on the record: 121
first: 2026-03-03
most recent: 2026-03-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Not just of our time, but of all time. And there's going to be disruption. There's going to be large scale dislocation. And it's simultaneously the fastest growing technology and product out there, but among the least popular. People are worried. AI is possibly going to take my job. Do I really like it? And of the majority of AI companies out there are private companies, even though some of them are in valuations of tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars Means retail investors can't invest in them. And juxtapose that with the fact that”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am obsessed with the business world. The thing that I'm most Focused on right now in sort of my life as Robin Hood founder and CEO is getting more people into the markets and in particular giving access to private markets. I think The biggest iniquity in capital markets today. And I think it's very important because you see all of these companies who Building AI models. We're in the midst of possibly the greatest technology revolution.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think math is a good way to train your brain into doing hard things. And it's almost like... You can deadlift 500 pounds, then picking up your crawling baby from the floor is very, very easy, right? So no business problem is as complicated as solving a really, really hard math problem. So if you get used to the pain and the suffering and the mental stress of beating your head against the wall for 12 hours on one single math problem, which Bejo and I did very, very often when we were in college, we would like pull all nighters working on these problem sets. Think that's really, really good training. It's like going to the gym for business problems.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I heard there was reports of open AI calling a code red. And it's funny because when Chad GPT came out in 2022, Google called a code red. They said this is uh. Existential threat to Google search. And then at that time, everyone was counting them out. They were like a big, slow company. How are they ever going to catch up? They're just getting disrupted. Look at the Google search market share. So it's just amazing how quickly the narrative can shift But yeah, I think Sundar and Sergei and the team have done an amazing job. You got to tip your hat off to them.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But alpha proof, they did not announce a gold this year. So, yeah, the harmonic team was excited about that. In a year, we were able to surpass alpha-proof capabilities.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, which is, again, it converts mathematics from English into a programming language. You get that reward signal. And actually, interestingly enough, alpha proof was the first AI model to get a silver medal, to achieve silver metal performance at the IMO last year.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally, people tend to use ChatGPT as a first crack, but it's a good general model. It'll probably give you a reasonable answer, but I don't think they're going to spend the time to go deep on every single domain. And I think that's why you're already starting to see a little bit of specialization. Anthropic has a very good coding model. And they've basically done very well in the enterprise for software engineering. They've kind of specialized there. Google obviously very, very strong model in general reasoning. Gemini 3 came out and Surprise some people, though if you were looking at the Robin Hood prediction market, we had a prediction market. For the majority of the year on what's going to be the top AI model by the end of the year, I think it became pretty clear mid-year that Gemini was going to take it.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it depends on. I think there's going to be multiple models, and it's really going to depend on the data that is used to feed them. So, for example, one thing that's great about Aristotle, which harmonics model, is you've got mathematicians that are using it to ask very complex math. So, if you've got all the mathematicians using the model, then you basically have an advantage with mathematics data. And I think that's true in other domains. I think that”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A really deep result in physics. I mean, we can understand the fundamentals of unification, which has been a big problem for, it's been the problem in theoretical physics for 50 years. gravitation with the other forces. And we haven't had much progress in that. probably AI could help with that. And then, if we can figure that out, the consequences for building new engineering are profound.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that. We've already shown an ability to create new knowledge. And I think that's going to continue. So, you know, right now, let's say you can easily at low cost produce a proof that's. 10 pages long, and actually we can produce longer ones, but just as an example, per unit cost and time, you can produce a 10-page proof. Well, in a year it'll get to 100 pages. In three years, it'll get to 100,000 pages. And then you can say, okay, what type of problem has 100,000 page proof? That's probably some of the deepest problems in mathematics. And at the same time, that same thing is not just going to happen in mathematics, but all dependent fields, physics, computer science. And what's the equivalent of”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Model reasons about it. It tries to solve it. And on the way to solving it, it solves, it generates some lemmas and facts that are proved. And because you can machine check them, you know that they're correct. And if they're correct, you sort of like put them into the training. And so as it solves problems, it gets smarter and smarter. And that's basically the idea. So there's similarities. It's probably closer to training a model to play chess really, really well than it is to training just like English language LLM. But I think the fundamental techniques tend to overlap. I mean, there's a lot of reinforcement learning and post training. There's pre-training as well. But yeah, the main difference is this ability to machine check the results, which gives you a good reward signal for your reinforcement learning.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, two things. One is. They tend to train. So, I mean, they do a lot of little things to train these models. And I think these models used to be like a monolithic LLM. Now they're actually a network of agents, which Aristotle is. It's actually a network of agents that are optimized for slightly different things. I guess at the highest level, the interesting thing about math is Can pose a math problem as computer code. And if you pose it as computer code, there's actually a way to machine check the validity of the proof. Yeah. So it can be checked automatically. And what that allows you to do is to create a synthetic data pipeline. And so all of the data that the vast majority of the data that trains Aristotle is actually data that we generate. It's not internet data. And what happens is you ask a question.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's always some controversy around these announcements. But I mean, it's solving an unsolved problem that people care about is a big deal. And you've seen making the jump from competition math to solving unsolved Erdish problems in a couple of months. And the goal is to ladder that up to unsolve problems that everyone cares about that are of like massive importance. And actually yesterday they released an update that Aristotle learned to write computer code too. So on a software verification benchmark, it hit a new state of the art of something around 97%.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, yeah, the problem itself is too complicated for me to understand and solve. But Paul Erdrush was this very prolific mathematician. He would actually travel around the world, stay at people's houses, and work with them for a week or two weeks at a time, solving math problems. And so there's like a collection of articles and books of problems that Erdush conjectured. They're usually conjectures like it seems like this thing is true mathematically. And so now there's websites that collect these things. There's something like 1100 Erdish problems. About half of them are open, unsolved. Yeah, harmonics solved at least one of them. There's always some debate like, is it solved somewhere else on the internet and nobody found it?”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five people got perfect scores in the International Mathematical Olympiad. And just to contextualize, I say high school, but I bet you I would struggle solving a single IMO problem. Yeah, yeah, right now. So Aristotle, which is our model, solved five out of six. The bet always was that. This would actually generalize to other things. So, if you're good at math as a human, I felt this because I was a math major. If you could figure out how to solve a math problem, you could solve pretty much any problem. So that could generalize to general problem solving. Like you'd be better at making business decisions, for instance. And so we've tested that. Actually, over the past few weeks, they released a product for mathematicians and researchers and it's been used to solve unsolved math problems.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Yeah, and basically the company that I started a couple years ago that I'm chairman of is called Harmonic. And it's building mathematical superintelligence, which is AI that can solve math problems at a level exceeding humans, the best human mathematicians. And it's not quite at a level exceeding all of the best human mathematicians, but it certainly exceeded my level, which I didn't think it would do so quickly. But yeah, earlier this year, we actually achieved gold medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad, which is the world's most prestigious mathematics competition. These are like cracked high schoolers.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inference and build agents. And that's just the stuff we do internally. In the product, we have Robin Hood Cortex, which is our AI model. And the most visible use case of it in Robinhood right now is stock and crypto digest. So if you go to a stock that's moved, it'll give you a real-time view of what's actually driving it. I think some of our competitors have done this as well. But I think what makes our offering especially compelling is it updates. Basically, every minute. It updates whenever new information comes in. Whereas, you know. I think most companies do it once per day, and it's just basically stale for companies in which lots of news happens.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually not easy. And I think that most companies are vendoring this, and this is the thing that vendors are hard at because, you know, vendors not going to be able to save you much time in the actual process of plugging into all your systems. That's going to be work that your engineers internally are going to have to do. But I think what made it easier is from a pretty early point We wanted to make our data easily querable internally because we wanted to run good analytics to understand what was going on. And so once your data is querable, it makes it so that you generally have good systems hygiene. It's in one place. It's like got clean interfaces. You spend time making sure that it's correct. And I think the work that we did, not really thinking about AI, made it a little bit easier to plug in these models and actually run.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So rough numbers. Let's say 90% of companies are in phase one. 90% of the ones that are in phase one are probably in phase two. Then you have phase three, which is okay now I can actually do non-read-only actions. I can change stuff. Maybe I'll refund you if you're not happy with your purchase. You can refund your gold subscription fee. So that involves actually some pretty deep. Work deep integration into all of the backend systems so you can imagine the utility goes up as you get deeper, but the cost also goes up. And so actually I think very few are in phase three. That's where Robin Hood's in.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Better, well, you know, and it's better than actually having links to the help center that you'd have to navigate, which actually I think probably still most companies aren't using AI for customer support and they're still pushing you towards just navigating a help center. We were there too, probably five years ago, five to ten. Phase two is All right, you're getting a little bit more sophisticated. You're not just taking the data from your help center and feeding it into the AI, but now the AI can actually go into the database. They can say, okay, I can see Shane's account. He's got $50,000 in there, and he just deposited some money yesterday from Chase Bank. So you can pull that data and you can use it to provide better contextual support, but it's still read-only.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, don't think anybody can do that. I think these are really hard problems to get right. Yeah, because it's not just, of course, most people don't even have metrics to track this stuff, which is, I can give them the metrics. Hopefully they're useful to listeners. Thinking about, let's just say customer support, for example. I like to break down customer support progress in AI into three stages. And you'll see more phases. Than stages, I should say. Phase one, phase two, and phase three. Phase one is a company puts the help center into the AI chatbot. And so the chatbot can answer any question from the help center. Most companies doing AI for customer support are in this phase, right? Where it's just. Pretty easy to get going. Most people just like a better”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deep work over a long period of time by great artists, but if you can empower those artists with the best tools, 11 labs, mid journey, runway, the total amount of creative can increase by 100 or 1,000 X. And you can actually make them much more personalized. So I think that's the next frontier that companies aren't really talking about, but I think we'll get to the point where next year you'll see a big step change.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The total engineering velocity or the total monthly commits per engineer continuing to increase because you want to make sure that it's not just AI is doing a larger and larger percentage of the software engineering contributions, but that in aggregate you're making more contributions and being more productive. And so I think we started with those internally and now we have it baked into the process where we almost think of it as headcount. Okay, how much compute do you need next year? Instead of this headcount, how hard have you tried to use AI agents in the workflow for every team? And I think the next frontier where we're going to see really interesting stuff is on creative and marketing. So you can imagine to create really high quality advertising collateral would have taken a lot of like”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very popular command line interface tool recently. And I think the important thing about AI adoption is You have to track the right metrics and actually look at them very, very carefully. And I think the great thing about software engineering and customer support is the metrics are pretty easy, right? For customer support, you have to look at AI deflection rate, what percentage of tickets that would otherwise be going to an agent are actually being fully self-served by AI. And you want to drive that up as high as possible. And for software engineering, you're looking at percentage of code commits generated by AI, but you also want to check that with”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Traditionally, that's been a big cost center or peers and competitors because it scales with number of customers on platform. And so we've done so much innovation there. By and large, if you interact with customer service on Robinhood, you're interacting with our AI agents. And I think we are best in class on that side. On the software engineering side, you can think of it as accelerating product velocity and development. So we've seen tremendous increases in product velocity from our engineering teams because A very early point, we've made it as easy as possible to use every AI tool. It started with a GitHub co-pilot because that was the only game in town. And then, of course, cursor and Winsurf until that got acquired. And then, of course, Claude Code has been.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah I think we haven't talked too much publicly about it, but we're doing a AI event on December 16th, which is our first big event focused on AI, as well as prediction markets. But AI is going to be a big part of it as well. I think that when we talk about internal operations, what we told the team from the very beginning is, look, there's two areas where we want to start with and be absolute best in class in our space. And that's customer service and software engineering. Because if you think about what really moves the needle, those are the big teams that have multiplicative impact, customer service interacts with all of our customers that are having issues or need help with the platform.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we don't feel like we have to be tethered to the old Apple model, which some people just replicate. But to answer your questions, no, I think I don't think that was necessarily a rule that Apple had for the events. Actually, in a lot of their events, they get really into the technical details of the computers and they share the megahertz of the processors. And they even had bakeoffs where they would load a website with a PC and they would load it with a Mac. And obviously the Mac would load 10 times faster and everyone would be like, oh my God. One second, 1.5 second load time versus 7.9”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, yeah, you know, when we started doing these events, that was a huge inspiration. We were like, well, we should just make them exactly like the Apple events because they've perfected it. But then now we're on our fifth event this year. We started it last year. And it's really just, we don't think about the Apple events at all. I think it's almost like... Learning to play a new instrument, right? When you first learn to play an instrument, you know, you just have to practice and do what the other greats have composed in the past. But then once you get to a certain level, you know enough to innovate and to break rules and to change things. Now we really like try to make it different each time.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's really just about storytelling, and you have to spend time and have people thinking about it. And if I don't think about it or if the CEO doesn't think about it, then I don't think the story gets told. So as a founder and CEO, you have to spend a lot of time personally getting involved in that, I think.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I just assume the average person watching is in the details of the business like I am, which I think is not a great assumption. So I think really thinking about her from first principles, if you're someone who has never heard of a prediction market, for example, how do you explain what a prediction market is and why it's innovative, why it's important for society for these things to exist. We start there. And then I think once you have the foundation, you try to make sure all the products plug into that foundation. You tell a coherent story.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. It wasn't always the case. I think we have great people that think entirely about the storytelling of what we're doing, what the purpose is. I think the events themselves are a good forcing function because if you're communicating a new product to 20 million people. Really forces you to distill it into the essence of what 20 million people can understand. So I think where I tend to Sometimes make mistakes and communication is, I can get too jargony, too in the details.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I present at the events and I introduce the products, not just me, but with the teams that are working on them. So the event is like television show. Yeah.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, usually I'm involved in the most critical product launches or projects that are going on at any given time. And a lot of times we are, so we do a lot of product events. I think this year we're going to have five of various sizes and scales, but usually the product events tend to have themes. So actually we're doing one in a couple of weeks. Well, I should probably be more explicit about the date. We're doing one on December 16th of this year, so towards the end of the year. And it's called Yes, No. So it's an event on prediction markets and AI. We spend a lot of time just making sure the messaging is right, the design of the event, the look and feel, of course, the products that go into it. So, yeah, there's a big component that's just making sure that the next event that we're going to do is.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, y And yeah, you know, I think that sometimes it's really nice to lighten up some extremely serious things so that people actually enjoy talking openly about goals that things that aren't going well because the assumption is everyone in the leadership team is, if not exceptionally strong, at least very, very strong. So usually if things aren't going well. There's a good reason. It's usually not for lack of effort, and sometimes having the perspective of multiple people can really help us quickly improve things and turn them around.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sharing progress on goals. It's either green, yellow, or red. If it's green, we don't really have to talk about it. If it's red, I think it deserves some scrutiny. So, you know, sometimes we go through. Red goals and see how we can help turn it around as quickly as possible. And that involves a little bit of ceremony. You know, I have a gavel and... I hit the gavel on”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so weekly leadership meeting is a big meeting. There's a lot of people involved. And I like having large groups of people involved because then everyone can sort of like hear what's on everyone's mind. I don't like having a lot of one-on-ones. And some people are big one-on-one fans, but over time I've my one-on-ones are basically on demand when you need something critical or some important decision needs to be made. So the leadership meetings are either Important information that I want to cascade like they're at the beginning of the week. So a lot of it is, you know, I spent some time thinking over this weekend about this or we should be moving faster on this. Or it's, we also review goals. So I like a very simple mechanism for.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sitting right next to them. You know, I always like to have some interns or early career people working on important things. And I like to be around the people that are working on the key priorities as well. Yeah, we don't just stick them in the basement and have them fetch coffee. The big thing is we actually want you to have to work on projects that ship to production and do meaningful work. And what I like to say is I started off as an intern at Robin Hood. I mean, I didn't have any career experience. I went straight from school into becoming an entrepreneur. And so I kind of have empathy for what it's like. And if I can succeed and become the CEO of a company from an internship and then everyone should have the ability to do that.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They get further along, and the folks working there can be more disconnected from the young people. And then that puts you at risk of becoming more of a generational company in the sense that Charles Schwab serves baby boomers very well. You had e-trade coming later that was really a Gen X company. They've struggled a little bit getting the younger generation excited. And I know They try very hard to get there, but I think the best way to do it is to actually make sure that the company itself has the point of view of young people.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I should say I'm not super familiar with how every company does it, right? So I'm sure some companies do many of these things. Yeah, perhaps one thing that's unconventional, at least in financial services is emphasis on early career people from a very beginning, we put our company next to Stanford University. We would spend a lot of time recruiting interns and engineers from there. And that was my alma mater and Beijing, my co-founder as well. So we would spend time actually when we were individually hiring everyone, going to career fairs at the top tech universities. And I still spend a lot of time with early career folks and interns. And I think it's very, very good for the company because a lot of the companies in our space tend to get older.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think six months. Once you know it's not a fit, is way too long. But of course, sometimes we've had people that have come in and for whatever reason they don't hit the ground running right away. But if we see potential in someone and they're extraordinarily good at a particular thing, sometimes they actually get there and that could take six months. But yeah, generally speaking, I think what most companies suffer from is process getting in the way and actually making it very, very difficult for people to get rid of low performers. And I think we try to make that very, very, very easy.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want to make it, I mean, sometimes it's pretty obvious that for whatever reason we made a hiring mistake usually that someone's not a fit. And at that point, we want to make it as easy as possible. So yeah, if it's three weeks, doesn't make sense for us or for the person to continue.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that if I think about culture, I won't go through every single value, but those are the big ones. If I think about culture, it's a few things. It's how we hire the talent that we bring in, how we performance manage and reward people, and also the working environment. What's the environment like in the office? Hiring, it's really top talent. I'd rather have a small team of the best people than a large team of mediocre people That goes along with the high performance. How we compensate and performance manage, we want to make it disproportionately based on impact. And also if it's not working with someone, we want to make it as easy as possible process wise for that person to go somewhere else, right? We don't want to spend too much time.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But really, what we want to incentivize the opposite can you have a lot of impact with the smallest possible team? So high performance is one of them. Safety always. We have a safety always value, which means, sure, we're going to move fast, you know, sure we're holding ourselves to an absolute performance bar, but you can't use that as an excuse to cut corners or compromise on the security of customers and their money. So that's a very important one. Regulatory compliance is very, very important to our business as a trusted financial platform. So we have that one. Lean and discipline, another one. I always ask, how can we do more with less? We scrutinize every dollar and every process as well.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Values are high performance. So we make it clear to not just employees, but anyone applying for a job that this isn't meant to be like cushy, chill job. Like this is for people that want to stretch and to do in one year what maybe another company would expect you to do in 10 years. So we keep a very, very high performance bar and that filters into how we compensate. Like we reward people disproportionately based on impact and we try to stay away from rewarding people on conventional things. Think about a typical company. People are paid generally proportional to the org size that they manage. And if you think about what that incentivizes, that incentivizes empire building. I want to have a big org with a big team because then. According to traditional HR metrics, more important.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this was like one of those COVID era things that. Some companies probably still have, but yeah, anyway, and there was fear like we were taking back a perk. From employees They like their wellness days, they'll complain. Well, we took off the wellness days. There was complaining for one day, and then we never heard about it again. So I think once you start doing these things and you realize our deepest fears about the consequences were wrong. Yeah, you'll learn some things.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of it was this thing that from the beginning I just didn't really like the idea of but a lot of people felt very strongly and there was just too many things happening but yeah we were like we had these wellness days Where entire teams would take a wellness day after working particularly hard. And at one point, I was just like, let's kill these wellness days. And there was just a lot of fear. I mean, some people actually legitimately like the idea of wellness days. I was like, I don't want to be a wellness day company. We have generous PTO. Take a PTO. And this whole idea that an entire org or team would take the same day off. That seems like a problem. What if there's an issue and we need someone? The entire org is taking a day off, doesn't make any sense.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. So I have a good business suggestion. Usually things... Things get easier if you do them multiple times. And you could practice doing this once and making a big show of it. Like actually maybe you take a small thing that you were wrong about that you wanted to undo and just say, I want to tell you about something that I completely screwed up. It was a wrong decision and now we're taking it back. It could be like the snacks in the office or something. Rid of Sichuan food catering on Wednesdays. And then see how it goes. And then you realize, well, maybe it's not so scary, then you can do it for. Serious thing, and then maybe eventually you can do it for three or four things simultaneously. I'll give you an example during COVID. We introduced”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I probably would have done things differently around the edges with the culture and thought about the values and really sort of like enshrined them earlier, you know, the values I mentioned earlier, high performance, safety always, lean disciplined, one Robin Hood”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, I'm not to use another weightlifting analogy, but they're so good. If you want to get really, really strong, there's one way where you just like gradually build up muscle mass and keep your fat low over long periods of time. But what Robinhood did was we bulked up gigantically and also gained a lot of fat in the process. And then we did like a massive leaning out. I think that works for a lot of people and you end up getting to the same place. And in retrospect, I'd say. It's too much to say that I would have done it differently. I think we had to adapt to. To what our reality was at the time. So I don't know if we had.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The inputs that led to that tremendous acceleration in the business and the headcount growth were not sustainable inputs. Like you only have one COVID. And so when that reversed, we actually, it gave us an opportunity to rethink all the changes that we made to keep up and reset a little bit, which I think at the time was painful. Led to a much healthier company. It's like.”
2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source