Vlad Tenev

For Robinhood,

I think we were the only ones that were in a position to connect these two ideas.

It was before FinTech was a thing.

It was actually very, very hard to get it off the ground, but I think we were fortunate to have one foot in both worlds, to have this entrepreneurial financial experience in a world where to really understand finance,

The typical path would be you'd graduate from school, you'd join as an analyst, some kind of entry-level position at a bank.

They wouldn't really show you how things work.

You'd have to kind of work your way through, and maybe 10, 20 years later, you would make VP or partner, and you'd get some visibility, but you were still very much kind of a cog in a giant machine.

Yeah.

They weren't really hiring mathematicians.

Actually, when I graduated with my math degree, I did apply for some jobs, and I found myself incredibly unemployable.

You know, that was kind of my first point at which I was disillusioned by...

getting my math degree.

That was the point where I realized, okay, this is really hard.

I'm really competing against the smartest people in the world for placement in these programs.

And whenever I'm talking to these prospective employers, they're just like, can you program?

So they didn't really value all this hard theoretical math work that I was doing.

And this was before data science, before AI.

I think now mathematicians are having much more of a resurgence.

Yeah, it was disappointing in a sense, but also I think lowered the activation energy for me to become an entrepreneur because I didn't really have much to lose.

I mean, I was in grad school making $18,000 a year.