Vladimir Tenev

And so we had to overcome that.

The other thing was the commissions.

Everyone else was charging $7 to $10 per transaction.

We lowered it to zero, which was very disruptive.

And then the third thing was...

People were just kind of like disillusioned with the state of the financial system after the financial crisis.

So the financial crisis sowed some seeds of disillusionment because a lot of people saw their friends, maybe their parents losing their jobs.

And then the recovery

over the next five to ten years was very much unevenly distributed.

So the financial crisis itself was kind of perceived as this sort of like screw up by the financial industry.

There were these subprime mortgages, these risky bets that went the wrong way.

And the entire market collapsed as a result of it.

Nobody was punished.

Nobody went to jail.

Right.

And the recovery just accrued to

the wealthiest people the top one percent and so you had a lot of lack of trust you had the occupy wall street movement you had all this sort of like societal frustration that manifested as just a lack of trust in the big financial companies and so i think a new brand the the door opened for a new brand in the space

And I think Robinhood really resonated with people because it was a little bit more of an optimistic view.

It wasn't we weren't saying with Robinhood that, you know, the entire system is broken.

Let's burn it to the ground.