Vlad Tenev

So they created this strategy that everyone was using at the time of you just put up a landing page that describes your product, but the product doesn't exist yet.

And then you just see how people interact with the landing page.

Are people clicking?

Are people spending time on it?

Are they giving you your email address?

And so every startup that didn't do this had a little bit of a harder time.

So we would go and raise capital and we'd say, well, we're building this brokerage.

First of all, do you have your licenses?

No.

How do you know if anyone is going to want it?

If people get past that, you say, well, we're pretty sure if we can offer this thing that everyone else offering for 10 for free, we should be able to get some traction and it's going to be a great product.

Well, you guys are mathematicians, you've never built a consumer product.

Mathematicians, the ones I know, don't really build great user interfaces.

So it was a lot of skepticism.

And moreover, we couldn't do that landing page thing because you're actually not allowed to market brokerage services without getting your license.

So there was kind of a chicken and an egg situation where we needed the license to be able to market, but we kind of needed to be able to market and validate some demand in order to get our license.

And the regulators wanted to see us with a million dollars in operating capital.

if they approve you as a broker that's opening retail accounts, they want to make sure you have enough money to be around for at least a year, because otherwise it's like a mess to unwind those accounts, so they don't want to deal with that.

So we were able to

I guess, negotiate a little bit and demonstrate that for a million dollars, we could run this brokerage business for a year.