Vladimir Tenev

I didn't think it was possible.

But one after the other, within the span of a couple of weeks, all of our big competitors replicated our business model.

They said, we're going to zero commissions.

And what happened was...

TD Ameritrade and E-Trade, when they announced this and they kind of had their hand forced because it wasn't just us anymore, but their other big competitors, their stocks went down by like 35% in one day.

So, I mean, it was a bloodbath.

The best analog that I can give, and this hasn't happened, is let's say you're a legacy car maker and all of the legacy car makers within the period of a couple of weeks said, we're going fully electric.

That's like the equivalent of what happened in the brokerage industry.

And as a result of that, two of the big players, E-Trade and TD Ameritrade, couldn't continue on as standalone companies.

So they got gobbled up by bigger conglomerates.

TD Ameritrade became part of Charles Schwab.

E-Trade became a part of Morgan Stanley.

So there's just a wave of...

industry consolidation into these like large asset managers.

Yeah.

I think that for a while, that was our number one focus.

We were laser focused on being the best place to get started investing.

And that was just,

all that, like 100% of our energy and you can think of our marketing went toward that.

But it's not the case anymore.