Vlad Tenev

I never felt like I could build something meaningful.

I was at this party in San Francisco in I think it was early 2012.

And this was still when we were running our second business, the software business selling the picks and shovels to hedge funds.

And I was explaining to this person at the party what we were doing.

In San Francisco, a lot of people are, you know, tell me about your startup sort of thing.

I was like, okay, well, we have this technology.

It's really fast.

Back then we weren't competing on cost, but it was all about latency.

Like how quickly can you take a signal from the market, be able to interpret it and spit out a trade in response.

And we were talking microseconds here.

So you take the signal.

Michael Lewis wrote a book about this.

He did, yes.

And that book caused a lot of problems for me later on.

Yeah, because that book was published right when Robinhood was announced and launched.

Effectively, I was telling this person about my business.

And we have these customers that are using our software.

They're trading billions of dollars per day in volume with a small team of people.

And it's really fast.

And by the way, it's very efficient.