Vlad Tenev

It would be almost like if all the car makers got together in response to the Tesla threat and said, we're going all electric, full bore in the same week.

And so what happened was the ones that were public and trading oriented, TD Ameritrade and E-Trade were the two big ones.

Their stocks fell by like 35% in one day, just cratered, right?

Schwab, who was less dependent on trading commissions, they had more of a retirement advisory business, sort of stickier, they fell, but more like 10%.

And I had sort of like two feelings about it, right?

One was, holy shit, this is a little scary.

Our biggest differentiator, like the reason why you would tell someone to use Robinhood, you're free, has become commoditized.

But then I would get all these messages streaming in of people kind of congratulating me, like, amazing, thank you.

You saved, you know, people in their retirement accounts don't have to pay fees anymore, which was kind of nice.

And the outcomes of that were E-Trade and TD Ameritrade didn't continue as standalone companies.

they had to get gobbled up by larger incumbents.

So TD was eaten by Schwab, E-Trade got gobbled up by Morgan Stanley, and so the space consolidated.

But another thing happened.

So I thought that the public narrative would be very positive.

And it would be, look what Robinhood did.

They changed the industry.

And we had some of those articles.

Exactly.

But we didn't get much of that.

And instead, that was the beginning of our negative press and when things got very, very negative for Robinhood.