Vlad Tenev

And so in the back of my mind, my fear was...

Total platform shutdown because of load.

I was like, okay, let's get the engineers to make sure.

We were having daily war rooms, code red situation.

What are all the bottlenecks?

But yeah, what we didn't see was this clearing house deposit situation which came out of nowhere.

What is that?

Explain that.

Yeah.

Basically, as a broker,

We have to put up firm capital to back the positions that our customers make from trading.

The formulas for how much cash from our balance sheet we have to put up kind of depend on how one-sided the flow is.

So typically under normal circumstances, people are buying and selling, so you kind of end up being flat.

But in this situation, when something's going up and all the retail are pretty much buying, it was very one-sided.

These rules reared their ugly head and basically made our deposit requirements balloon.

They went from sub 100 million a couple of days before GameStop to in the billions within a span of something like 24 hours.

And then how did all this play out, right?

I was sleeping.

And at this point, I was trying this thing.

So you can imagine the depths of COVID.