Vlad Tenev

So there's like the quiet period.

You can't talk about stuff.

You have to be extremely careful what information you disclose and when.

And I think my first approach was, okay, I don't know when I'm breaking the rules.

I'm not super comfortable with this, so maybe I just don't say anything.

Let's just not worry about it, just focus on the business, not communicate.

Then it was doing the bare minimum public stuff in the way that it's always been done.

How long of a period is that?

Well, you kind of have it every quarter.

So for example, the quiet period is the period between the end of the quarter and when you announce earnings, where you can't be like, you have to be careful not to share any recent numbers, anything non-public, not to do any tipping.

And then there's another quiet period that's around the time of the IPO.

So we had to deal with that too, because I did a second IPO for Robinhood Ventures Fund One, RVI, which is essentially, you can think of it as a venture capital fund that invests in private companies, but we wanted to take it public so that retail investors can get access to those same private companies.

It's a very cool product.

But yeah, so at first I was kind of going through the motions.

Everyone has this impression that being public is kind of a chore, right?

You don't want to do it, you only do it because you have to.

And so I was doing earnings the same boring way that everyone was doing them, which is you have your Polycom, you kind of read your script word for word, you open it up to analyst questions from the institutional analysts, and then you have like five listeners on the call.

I did a few earnings calls that way.

And then I realized that we have all these fans, all these retail customers and they're tracking the company performance and how we're doing on YouTube.

I started watching their YouTube analysis and you can imagine,