Vlad Tenev

I didn't really have a cushy job at Google.

People weren't fighting over me.

And so that put me in a position where I could take some risk without really worrying about what I was leaving behind.

Yeah, so I was very lucky in a sense.

I was kind of like climbing this treadmill of education, you know, going to the best high school, going to one of the best universities, succeeding really well and getting good grades.

But then this math path was sort of like a career dead end that really gave me an opportunity to reset.

I think it would have been really challenging because the football players, if every trade had to go through an actual person to get processed.

It limits the number of trades that can happen.

And it would have limited the cost.

You probably couldn't fully automate it and lower the cost.

We could lower the cost because everything was electronic.

Yeah.

It was all just a purely electronic transaction, which made the idea of it costing $10 kind of ludicrous.

And when we'd go talk to customers, we'd ask them, why do you think it costs this much?

they all would tell us, well, it's because someone has to be doing something, right?

Of course, none of the big guys were actually processing trades manually at that point.

Everything had gone electronic.

They were just collecting their margins, right?

And they had brick and mortar stores.

They had high overheads.