Vlad Tenev

Nobody had mobile apps.

So we started thinking, we're like, well, is there some reason why you can do this for really cheap on the institutional side, but not on the retail side?

Are there additional rules and regulations?

And we got deeper and deeper and deeper.

and we just realized there's no fundamental reason.

It's just no one had done it.

Nobody had done it, and it was kind of a new thing.

I mean, every 10 or 20 years, someone comes and tries, right?

But it's not very many people were trying.

As a matter of fact, E-Trade, which was kind of a disruptor in a similar vein to Robinhood, started in the 80s in Palo Alto, California, oddly enough.

with these two older guys.

One of them was like a business guy, and the other one was an engineer.

And the business guy, I think he was in his 60s or 70s, this guy Bill Porter, had just gotten a Macintosh.

And his idea was, I love my Macintosh, it would be really cool to be able to trade stocks on it.

And that was kind of the genesis behind E-Trade, which became the dominant sort of like .com first online broker.

So yeah, every 10 or 20 years, something happens where the right people kind of get together and create something.

My college best friend and I, we bonded over physics.

So we both came to Stanford to study physics.

We both met in the physics department as physics majors.

And we would challenge ourselves by taking all the graduate classes.