Vlad Tenev

I want to pick up these stocks when they're on sale.

So that was good for us.

Actually, big, big crashes historically have been some of our biggest days of purchasing stocks.

And then interest rates going to zero.

I mean, the government, the Fed immediately intervened when COVID started and lowered the rates from 2.5% at the time down to zero.

And that has an effect because if you've got 2.5% rates, what that means is if you can put your money in a high-yield savings product, you can get a 2.5% risk-free rate of return.

So investing in stocks becomes less attractive.

But when the rates go to zero, stocks become more attractive because there's opportunity cost leaving your money in cash.

So you see these flows into stocks.

And of course the stimulus, you know, the helicopter money sent to people.

A lot of people didn't need it, fortunately or unfortunately, and those people deployed it into their Robinhood accounts.

When the stimulus checks went out, did you see a big uptick in business?

Huge.

You know, that year, 2020, so end of 2019, we had something like 700 employees at Robinhood.

We made something like 270 million of revenue.

End of 2020, we had close to a billion in revenue, so 3 to 4x increase, and over 2,000 employees, the bulk of which hired remotely once we transitioned to COVID era work from home.

Yeah, now Robinhood is a comprehensive financial super app.

What was the first thing you added?

Well, first, I'd say the big thing was giving people more to trade, right?

So we started with stocks.