E22: Reflecting on the Robinhood situation with Bestie Guestie Vlad Tenev

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Now wait, Vlad, you have to turn your camera off, and then I'm going to do my little bit where the Bestie guesting door knocks.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:05)
Oh no, Jason.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:07)
No?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:07)
Let's not do that.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:08)
This is silly.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:09)
This is silly.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:09)
Here we go.

**Vlad Tenev** (0:10)
I can do it. It's very easy for me.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:12)
Don't worry about it. These guys don't want to do it. They don't like my bits.
Rain Man, David Sacks.
Hey everybody. Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All-In Podcast with us again, the queen of quinoa himself, David Friedberg, the Rain Man. Definitely counting cards. Yeah. Burn baby. David Sacks is with us. Chamath Palihapitiya, the dictator.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:59)
By the way, by the way, go ahead, J Cal.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:02)
I'm J Cal, aka Baby Seal.

**David Sacks** (1:05)
J Cal, could you take longer with the intros? I mean, this is like, this is like your one moment to shine.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:11)
It's like fucking torture.

**David Sacks** (1:12)
I like to do a little branding here.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:14)
I'm branding you guys as characters on the show.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:17)
I do want to give a big shout out and congratulations for David Friedberg. Wedding is big in a big way.
The story, by the way, we should actually have founder, crazy founder stories and we should have Friedberg tell the story of Metromile, but it closed its SPAC transaction and went public and it's doing great, and congratulations.

**David Friedberg** (1:39)
Thank you. Thanks, guys.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:40)
Golf clap.

**David Friedberg** (1:41)
Thank you.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:42)
Thank you.
And joining us this week as our second Bestie Guestie after a triumphant performance by Draymond Green on the last All-In podcast is Vlad Tenev, who is the co-founder and CEO of a new startup. We wanted to introduce everybody to it's called Robinhood. Vlad, tell everybody, what is Robinhood and what's the mission of this new startup you've got?

**Vlad Tenev** (2:13)
Thank you for having me here hanging with you guys. Robinhood's mission is to democratize finance for all. It's somewhat new. We've been around for a little bit over five years. And we have a mobile app and a website that allows customers to invest in stocks, options, cryptocurrencies.
We offer a debit card and a high-yield savings product as well. Commission-free and with no account minimums.

**David Sacks** (2:39)
Vlad, I think you've done an amazing job building this company. And you guys have done an amazing job democratizing access to the ability to trade. Let's fast forward to the issue that we discussed, I guess, a few pods ago because there was intense interest in this. I think it's our highest rated pod ever was discussing the GameStop issue. So you had these traders from Wall Street Bets, these Redditors, who, like you said, they perceive themselves as the heirs to Occupy Wall Street. They're trading for profit, also for revenge.
And then you guys, I guess, get a call in the middle of the night from the clearinghouse and you have to freeze the buy side of the trade the next day. I guess let's fast forward to that because that was the thing that got everybody up in arms. Could you, I guess, talk to us about kind of what happened? And I'm sure you didn't want to have to freeze trading, right? But you were being compelled by this clearinghouse. Can you kind of explain what they told you and why you had to do it?
And why not just ask them to give you the order and writing so you can post on your website so everybody would know you didn't have a choice? Is that something you could have done?

**Vlad Tenev** (3:52)
Well, I think the challenge was that no doubt we could have communicated this a little bit better to customers, right? By the time we restricted these securities to PCO and it was 13 securities that we limited to sell only, that process is actually operationalized within Robinhood.
We do it from time to time under various circumstances like corporate actions. When something has a reverse stock split or something like that, we can PCO it for a little bit. There's a button in a dashboard that you can click and automated emails get sent out. It's an operational process that I think in hindsight, we probably should have exceptionalized to make it clearer why we were doing this, just given all the swirl around all these meme stocks online. But as soon as those emails went out, the conspiracy theories immediately started coming. My phone was blowing up with, how could you do this? How could you be on the side of the hedge funds? Of course, we're not on the side of the hedge funds.