Vlad Tenev
Co-Founder & CEO, Robinhood. On 7 shows, 11 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@vladtenev ↗LinkedIn ↗robinhood.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
In 2013, he co-founded Robinhood alongside Baiju Bhatt, popularizing commission-free stock, options, and cryptocurrency trading for retail investors. He led the company through its 2021 IPO and guided it through high-profile market events such as the GameStop trading freeze.
7shows
11appearances
225statements
80resolved
67supported
2contradicted
84%fully supported
138said about them ↓ Everything Vlad Tenev said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Tenev denies Robinhood colluded with hedge funds to restrict meme stock trading
“The idea that somehow the most wrong thing was this allegation of collusion that we're somehow colluding with hedge funds that we have no business relationship with to somehow restrict buying of these stocks. Yeah, I think that was just wrong.”
Tenev: Robinhood was not pressured by outside forces to halt trading
“This wasn't, you know, a value judgment or some kind of moral stance and we weren't pressured into doing it by anything other than our regulatory deposit requirements.”
Stripe founders asked Robinhood not to tokenize their shares, says Tenev
“I've shared this viewpoint with Patrick and John, and they give me some variant of, oh, well, we're just a small Irish family company. Please don't tokenize my shares.”
Tenev: Robinhood enabled private stock tokenization without target company opt-in
“And so I think it's important for the tokenization mechanism to work. Without the opt-in of the companies that, that are being tokenized. And I think that's actually the innovation that we've been able to drive. Like we can, we figured out how to make this wor…”
Tenev: Robinhood restricted buying in 13 stocks to meet deposit requirements
“We just had to do what we did to meet our deposit requirements, because if we didn't do that, we would be in violation. And the consequences of that could have been much, much worse than simply halting buying in the 13 stocks.”
Tenev: Robinhood's $3.4B raise provided liquidity, not a deposit bailout
“We met all of our deposit requirements. The new capital that we raised, the 3.4 billion, wasn't to meet our ongoing deposit requirements. We had met them and in order to relax them and eventually unrestrict them, we needed to raise some more capital and eventu…”
Tenev: Robinhood does not have any business with hedge funds
“We don't really have any business with hedge funds.”
Tenev: Robinhood plans to take its investment vehicle, Robinhood Ventures, public
“We're working to solve this problem through tokenization in, in the EU and also through Robinhood Ventures in the US, which is a closed-down fund that we're gonna be taking public.”
Tenev: Financial products open to high-net-worth individuals should be retail-accessible
“Generally speaking, I think if it's available to wealthy people, high net worth individuals, it should be made available to retail as well.”
Tenev: Founders want fast capital, not on-chain equity issuance
“Nobody gives a shit about on chain issuance. Like the only place where people are even thinking about on chain issuance is like in your head. What people want is capital as a service.”
Vlad Tenev: Robinhood received a $3B deposit demand during GameStop saga
“We got this we got this bill in the automated clearinghouse system for three billion dollars.”
Tenev: Preventing retail investors from selling would have caused street riots
“If you have a customer who's unable to close their positions at the all time high, As bad as this was, not allowing customers to close their positions would have been much worse. I mean, there would have been, like, rioting on the streets if we had not allowed…”
Tenev: Clearing house deposit rules exacerbate volatility during market crises
“The problem is that, you know, when there's volatile events happening in the market, a lot of the brokers actually need that cash the most, right? They need that cash for their business. And you end up having to put larger and larger amounts of money to these …”
Tenev: Payment for order flow enabled commission-free trading for retail investors
“Payment for order flow enabled commission free trading, right? It helps cover the costs of the business that that, that leads to our ability to offer commission free trading. And moreover, it allows smaller investors to participate.”
Tenev: Harmonic solved at least one unsolved Erdős problem
“There's something like 1100 Erdos problems. About half of them are open unsolved. And yeah, Harmonic solved at least one of them.”
Tenev predicts AI mathematical proofs will scale to 100,000 pages in three years
“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 per unit cost and time, you can produce a 10 page proof while in a year it'll get to a hundre…”
Tenev: Harmonic surpassed Google AlphaProof's capabilities within one year
“Alpha Proof was the first AI model to get a silver medal, to achieve silver medal performance at the IMO last year.
But Alpha Proof they did not announce a gold this year.
So, yeah, we were we were, the Harmonic team was excited about that, that, you know, i…”
Tenev: Tokenization will lead non-US private investing before entering US
“Tokenization will be the primary vehicle for ex-US investment until we get regulatory clarity and you'll see tokenization of privates seep into the US as well.”
Tenev: Private companies will lose pricing control due to derivative markets
“So I think that it's gonna be tough increasingly in a global market to Have as much control over, over the price as maybe private companies have historically had.”
Tenev: Retail access to private company shares will become standardized
“And I think the same thing is going to happen for private retail access. It's just going to go earlier stage, but the benefits are so strong that I think that there'll be It'll be standardized as time goes on.”
Tenev: Legacy card issuers are too bloated to match 3% cash back
“I think it's a cost structure problem. You look at the big credit card companies and they have tens of thousands of people, right? Tens of thousands of people that are manually servicing the, these accounts and, you know, that they spend a ton of money on mark…”
Tenev: Prediction markets will disrupt insurance by cheapening fire and hurricane hedging
“You can trade and hedge fire risk. You can hedge hurricane risk. And if you think about the process of like insuring yourself against a fire or a hurricane, It can be very expensive and it's cumbersome. You have to talk to a broker on the phone and the contrac…”
Tenev: AI lacks public defenders because retail investors cannot buy shares
“AI is like one of the fastest adopted products, but also one of the least popular. People are afraid that it's going to take my job, that it's going to, you know, affect my life negatively. I think a big part of that is there's no retail investment in AI.”
Tenev: Retail access to private companies will be standard in 5 years
“And I think that, you know, five years from now, The exact mechanisms, whether tokenization is legal or closed-end funds, that's less clear. But what I know is I, I'm very confident that retail investors getting exposure to private companies Will be easier, mu…”
The other half of the tape: Vlad Tenev's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 131 times in 49 episodes across the shows. 7 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 45Jason Calacanis 21David Friedberg 17Molly O'Shea 9Rick Yang 7Jason Lemkin 4Shardul Shah 3Scott Sandell 3
Statements about Vlad Tenev, by other people (7)
Chamath: Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev lied on TV about liquidity crisis
“Who cares about Vlad? He lied on television. He lied on CNN. He lied on Fox. Where did he not lie yesterday?”
Sachs: Vlad Tenev succeeded in Congress by saying nothing quotable
“He testified for five hours. And said nothing quotable, you know, which is pretty much the best you can do in that situation.”
Robinhood founders built high-frequency trading software before Occupy Wall Street pivot
“So they had built software for high-frequency trading firms, and you saw sort of this shift in their founding story when they kind of realized that they were part of the problem that was starting to manifest itself at the time with Occupy Wall Street, really t…”
Robinhood raised $5.6 billion total, including a $2.4 billion emergency round
“To date, Vlad has raised over 5.6 billion dollars with Robin Hood, including a 2.4 billion dollar raise just this month, and some of their investors include the likes of Ribbit, Sequoia, Green Oaks, Index, IVP, Thrive, GV, and more incredible names.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 71
All-In 46
Sourcery 13
Big Technology 1
2026 30 mentions in 14 episodes 2 per episode
- Wix Founder: Will Base44 Win the Vibe-Coding Wars? | The Truth About the Economics of Vibe-Coding · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Klarna CEO: SaaS is Dead: Why Systems of Record Will Die in an Agentic World · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Elon Musk & The SpaceX IPO: Largest Wealth Event in History? | Shaun Maguire, Sequoia · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- OpenAI vs Anthropic IPOs, Anthropic $3T, Zuck's Price War, China Ends Open Source?, Trump Accounts
- I Tried Flying an Air Taxi With Archer’s CEO (Midnight Simulator) · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen
- Brian Armstrong: Rebuilding Coinbase Around Intelligence · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- World's First Trillionaire, Anthropic Fable Banned, The New Oligarchs, Iran Peace Deal
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 36 mentions in 19 episodes 2 per episode
- Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on Raising $1BN, CNN and CNBC Deals & the Polymarket Feud · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Predictions for 2026: Top Buy & Biggest Short | Why Salesforce Could Win & NVIDIA’s Challenges · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Windsurf x Google x Cognition: Full Breakdown: Who Made Money, Who Did Not · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon
- AI Psychosis, America's Broken Social Fabric, Trump Takes Over DC Police, Is VC Broken?
- Nuclear Race to Power Superintelligence · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- Surge CEO & Co-Founder, Edwin Chen: Scaling to $1BN+ in Revenue with NO Funding · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Base44’s Founder, Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 11 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 8 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- Shardul Shah: How Index Makes Decisions & Why Benchmarks & Averages in VC are BS | E1202 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Hot Swap growing, donors revolt, President Kamala? SCOTUS breakdown: Immunity, Chevron, Censorship
- AJ Tennant: How to Build a Sales Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | E2118 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- DOJ targets Nvidia, Meme stock comeback, Trump fundraiser in SF, Apple/OpenAI, Texas stock market
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2022 21 mentions in 2 episodes 11 per episode
- 20VC: The Robinhood Memo: The Early Metrics That Showed Robinhood was a Breakout Company, The Cost Structure of Robinhood in the Early Days and Why it is a More Efficient Business than eTrade & How Vlad Has Developed as a Leader Over Time with Rick Yang a
- 20 Product: Robinhood CPO on The 3 Stages of Product Management, How to Structure and Execute Great Product Reviews, The Secret to Building a World-Class Hiring Funnel in Product Team Building with Aparna Chennapragada
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 35 mentions in 9 episodes 4 per episode
- E23: Radical DAs, breaking down FB/Google vs. Australia, sustained fear post-vaccine & fan questions
- E20: Robinhood wrap up, Insiders vs. Outsiders, California's failing report card & how to fix it
- E19: Robinhood's GameStop decision: Why did it happen and how can it be prevented in the future?
- 20VC: Ribbit Capital's Nick Shalek on How To Think Through Ownership and Price Sensitivity, When More Money and Pre-Emptive Rounds are Good vs Bad & Investing Lessons from Yale's David Swensen
- E21: Media misalignment, subjects controlling narratives & more with bestie guestie Draymond Green
- 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard
- E60: The 2021 Bestie Awards PLUS Jack Dorsey starts the Web3 Wars
- 20VC: Qualtrics Founder, Ryan Smith on The 2 Hour Decision Whether To Sell Qualtrics for $8Bn in Cash, Why Tying Your Identity To Your Company Will Never Make You Happy and His Relationship To Risk, Wealth and Responsibility as a Result
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2021 →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Vlad's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Robinhood | 4 | 87 | 79% 23/29 | full record on 20VC → |
 KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Robinhood | 1 | 37 | 92% 12/13 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
| ALL-INLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Robinhood | 2 | 28 | 69% 9/13 | full record on All-In → |
| SOURCERYLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Robinhood | 1 | 24 | 92% 12/13 | full record on Sourcery → |
 a16zLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Robinhood | 1 | 22 | 100% 3/3 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Robinhood | 1 | 15 | 100% 7/7 | full record on How I Built This → |
| BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Robinhood | 1 | 12 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Big Technology → |