Vlad Tenev

And then when I graduated, it was kind of like, what are we going to do next?

So I went down to UCLA to get my PhD.

And he got a job in finance, kind of on a whim, at this hedge fund up in Marin County, just north of San Francisco.

his first month on the job, my first month in grad school, Lehman Brothers blew up.

And so this was the start of the global financial crisis.

2008?

2008, fall of 2008.

And sort of in the wake of this global financial crisis, we decide to start our own financial company.

He kind of pulls me into it, right?

I was a little bit skeptical, but I wasn't having

that much fun in my PhD program.

I think my first year in my PhD program, it sort of hit me like a ton of bricks that I entered into math with pure intentions and to be creative, but like this was a career.

I was signing up for a career and the aspects of the career that I was confronted with were really not that attractive.

But the first opportunity, we didn't get the idea for Robinhood.

It was really just, there's a lot of volatility.

We can trade for ourselves, create our own trading algorithms, our own hedge fund to capitalize on that.

And so that was the first business.

And that didn't work out very well.

So at that time, there was a bit of a changing of the guard.

So in the old days, institutional trading was run by these big banks, you know, the Goldman Sachs, JP Morgans, they would have institutional trading desks.