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Vlad Tenev

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121
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2026-03-03
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2026-03-03
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  1. “Which we always to some degree grew alongside Airbnb. We started at similar times. They were a little bit before. So that what was swirling in the air was we've got to batten down the hatches COVID, but our business was booming. And in fact, what we were hearing was customer support is getting strained, our engineering systems were strained. We ended up having to hire a bunch of people during COVID just to keep up. I think we continued that hiring and became a big company very quickly. Things didn't really work very well together. A lot of the people that joined since we were remote had never met in person. And so it wasn't just that We were being nice, or we were like coddling employees. 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

  2. “Know if I would characterize that. Still, think I'm very nice. Basically, what it was, I had to spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix things. I think that. When we went through COVID, There was a lot of pressure, not just from what other companies were doing, but also just because we were doing very well during COVID and growing very, very quickly. We went from, I'd say end of 2019, we had 700 people and something like 200 inch million in annual revenue. The next year, end of 2020, we had thousands of people and To a billion in revenue. It's like a 3x plus in growth. And you look around us and during COVID, a lot of our contemporary companies were struggling. Airbnb”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “We said, what can we give to our customers that will actually let them thrive in this particular market environment where you see high rates and cash is attractive? And that led to the birth of, or I should say the revival of Robinhood gold, which started with how do we give customers the absolute highest yield on their uninvested cash so they can put that onto the platform. We followed that up with Robinhood retirement, which has over 1.5 million accounts. I think it's the best retirement product on the market by a wide margin. We give everyone a 3% match if you're a gold member for making contributions into retirement. Business that thrives in that environment but maybe doesn't do as well when we're in a high interest rate. And so we ended up doing that. We diversified the business tremendously. And then quicker than I imagined.”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So I'm not going to give up. I'm also not going to batten down the hatches and say we're just going to ride this out and hope for interest rates to go to zero in the future. Just like not do anything and turn into an ostrich or a turtle. A lot of businesses were doing that. For example, the mortgage companies. A lot of the mortgage companies, if you listen to their public statements, they were like, well, the market's going to improve at some point and people want mortgages again.”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Has very competitive, and you really just want to win. And so I said, you know, I'm not going to be one of these people that either gives up because a lot of founders, unfortunately, we lost a lot of great founders in that time where they just left their companies, right?”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So we lost 80% plus of our market value since IPO, which a lot of times if people were calling Robin Hood a broken IPO, right? And I was getting advice that maybe I should try to figure out how to do a buyout and go private or something. So yeah, all of these things start coming up that don't actually have much to do with running your business and building products. They become kind of distracting. Yeah, that was very, very tough to navigate. And I think... Took some solace in the fact that it wasn't just Robin Hood specific issue, but nonetheless, I mean, as an entrepreneur.”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And our business was first timers getting into the stock market, buying stocks. So all of the tailwinds for our business turned into headwinds. And of course, when that happened, it was obvious to the market as well. And to be fair, not just Robinhood, but our entire sector got hit hard. We went from IPOing at about a $32 billion valuation in 2021 to in 2022 we were trading at like six dollars in 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

  8. “And that was having a big impact on people's discretionary spending and investing. And then later on to that. The interest rates. Government went from a long period of rock bottom interest rates to the highest interest rates in over 30 years. They want to four or five percent. And when that happens, actually. Investing becomes less attractive because you can get your average 7% rate of return from the stock market after inflation. Or you could get 5% just sitting in cash. So people naturally reallocate a little bit and start holding more cash and buying less stocks”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think 2022 was harder in the sense that it was sort of like a gradual, slower burn. I mean, GameStop was acute and very painful and stressful for a short period of time. But once we resolved the situation, unlocked the shares of GameStop so they could start being purchased again. And I basically like. Did my congressional hearing and did my roundtable of different podcast appearances, the acute part of it was over. Like the acute part of GameStop was really one day. Whereas in 2022, Was a gradual shift of all of the economic trends that had been tailwinds for the business during COVID, reversing rapidly into headwinds. So, for example, I mean, first the The COVID relief stimulus check stopped. Right, and then it became clear. Inflation was ticking up.”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I mean, I see what they were doing. I'm flattered. But yeah, I wasn't solving all these business problems. Grinding my smoothie, finishing my workout”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Just the idea of me being shirtless dealing with all these complicated business situations just made me laugh a little bit”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “While I did see the parts that I was in, which was about six minutes. And some of the rest. I actually thought, you know, I know it didn't do very well, but I found it more or less entertaining. My favorite part, which maybe wouldn't be other people's favorite part, or maybe it would for some ladies there was that my character was played by a very good-looking actor, Sebastian Stan, which, you know, I wasn't displeased about. I would have thought Adam Driver would also be good. Sebastian Stan maybe a slightly less good actor, but probably easier on the eyes, right? The thing that I enjoyed most is that in every single scene, he was shirtless. So it was like. The kitchen grinding a smoothie, talking about GameStop or in the bathroom shaving.”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “No, no, I thought that was probably the best media appearance of the week for sure. Not saying much because I had some bad ones, but.”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, like Joe Rogan was in the process of getting canceled. And I mean, Spotify was getting immense pressure from both sides, right? Do they deplatform Joe Rogan or? Do they piss off all the people that want Joe Rogan to be de platformed So that was probably, I mean, Daniel's, I'm sure, dealt with his share of crises, but that was probably his GameStop moment. So, yeah, I called him to pay it forward to offer whatever support I could have. And hopefully that was helpful to him. But he's actually, yeah, probably wiser and better than me in these things. So I don't know if he needed it. But yeah, at that time, Mark Zuckerberg called me and Elon Musk called me. Mark Benioff called me. And a nice positive side effect was these people probably wouldn't have cared about little Robinhood at the time. And suddenly, I think I got to talk 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

  15. “Oh, yeah. Actually, I didn't talk to Daniel at that point, but I did call him when he was... Dealing with his Joe Rogan thing”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I mean, I think the major thing is just that Robin Hood colluded with hedge funds to shut down trading. There was also another false narrative that I think is funnier. But yeah, Sequoia had to refute this. Someone put on the internet that the White House actually called Sequoia Capital, one of our venture capital investors, and got them to pressure us to shut down GameStop. So yeah, that was a particularly funny one. But if you look on Reddit, that had like thousands of reposts. So, yeah, I think that, I mean, we don't really have any business with hedge funds. So the idea that somehow a hedge fund would collude to have us shut down trading of a stock. I mean, always seems silly to me, but I think what we learned is. Juicy falsehood is more powerful than kind of a boring truth”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “That's absolutely right. So you can make the argument that we kind of started the whole thing. If you were joining Robin Hood in the year 2020 leading up to the whole GameStop thing, which by the way, a lot of people joined Robin Hood that year, GameStop was one of the collection of free stocks that was given to customers. So, yeah, a lot of people just came in, got their free GameStop share, and maybe they weren't engaged that much. But then when they saw GameStop going up, suddenly those shares were worth a lot of money.”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “A retail investor. And I think the fact that the name of the company was Robin Hood made this like a juicy, false narrative that continued to go viral. So remember in the beginning of the middle of the night when I woke up, my phone was basically unusable because it was like those videos you see of what happens if a Kardashian turns off, do not disturb on their phone. It just is a constant buzzing thing. So that was my mourning. I was like, the phone is completely unusable. I can't even get on a Zoom call because there's just random people calling me, telling me to turn it back on, you know?”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “You couldn't open up new positions, take on more risk for a period of about one day. So it wasn't even that long. But because there was a narrative that had taken over social media, this like viral narrative that it was the retail investors taking down the hedge funds and we were kind of the tool. People wanted to put it was like a good versus evil thing. And I think what was just, Would have at any other time for any other stock been kind of an innocuous risk management decision to control our internal risk turned into Robin Hoods on the side of the hedge funds colluding against the”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “But yeah, that's a big aside that has nothing to do with GameStop other than that was a very challenging time. It was towards the end of COVID. And I felt like everyone was going a little bit crazy. They'd been cooped up at home for about a year without much human-to-human interaction. I think from a crisis management standpoint, it was very difficult to deal with because we're doing these like conference video calls with all these different stakeholders. The regulators weren't in office. And so, yeah, basically what happened was we got this automated file in the middle of the night. And it had big numbers on it, right? It had big numbers that kept changing. It was a situation which had no precedent. And, you know, we had to make a tough call to put GameStop and a bunch of other companies on position closing only, which basically meant”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I've heard a lot from people that have many children, including myself. I'm more than one. It's like my wife says the pregnancy and the childbirth, very, very painful. But for some reason, I don't remember it. And then that sort of like evolutionarily gives you the signal that you should do it again. And I think we're doing I was at this IPO roundtable at the SEC about making the IPOs great again and with Robin Hood Ventures we're taking that fun publics. So we're doing another IPO. And I joked that, yeah, it's kind of like that the IPO process. I remember being painful and I didn't like it, but I don't really exactly remember why. And now I kind of want to do it again.”

    2026-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Near Death Experience of RobinHood | Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source