Scaling as a CEO with Vlad Tenev

How Vlad Leads Robinhood

Robinhood is 12 years old, has grown to ~3000 employees, and serves 25–30 million funded accounts holding roughly one third to one half trillion dollars in assets. The company generates about $4 billion in annualized revenue and operates a diversified financial app spanning ten business lines, each over $100 million in revenue.

1. Scaling as a CEO

Managing Scale Via Structured Goals

• Vlad manages 15–20 direct reports. This can flex higher depending on company priorities. 
  
  • He’s able to sustain this unusually large span by removing recurring one-on-ones and other standing meetings.
• Instead, he meets people in groups organized around specific goals or problem areas, which he finds more effective than individual check-ins.
  
  • One-on-ones can still happen on demand, typically when someone has a concrete issue to discuss or in informal settings like a walk or grabbing coffee.
• Vlad remains deeply involved in starting and developing new business units, particularly in emerging areas like prediction markets and tokenization.
  
  • His approach differs based on the maturity of the unit:
    
    • New businesses: he is hands-on, focused on ensuring launches happen on time and learning velocity is high. He is a bit more lax on setting specific goals here, since early goals are often unclear.
    • Established businesses: he manages through clear goal-setting and accountability by working with GMs.
• Each general manager (GM) aligns with him on annual and quarterly goals, which are designed to feel like an ambitious stretch 
  
  • Progress on these goals is tracked with a three-color system:
    
    • Green – on track, no meeting needed
    • Yellow – light discussion
    • Red – a full peer discussion where the GM is expected to communicate how they plan to course-correct
• He expects GMs to surface issues early and only escalates when targets slip into being red. This system allows him to stay close to innovation while scaling oversight, focusing his time on high-leverage problems rather than day-to-day operations.

Executing On a Product-Driven Cadence

• To decide how to spend his days, Vlad structures his time overall around major product events, which serve as the organizational cadence for the company.
  
  • Each event functions as a forcing mechanism to tie together product readiness, go-to-market planning, messaging, brand, PR, and execute for launch
  • For example, 2024 featured multiple large-scale launches:
    
    • Gold Event (Lost City of Gold): launched the Robinhood Gold Card, banking, and digital advisory products.
    • Crypto Event (South of France): focused on tokenization, perpetual futures, and EU expansion.
    • Hood Summit (September): centered on the active trader segment.
    • AI Event (December): unveiling Robinhood Cortex, the company’s AI assistant.
• Each cycle demands full focus until it’s over, after which he transitions immediately to the next.
  
  • This rhythm provides a clear structure for cross-functional alignment, ensuring the organization continually ships meaningful products while maintaining momentum.

When the CEO Stops Coding

• In the early stages, Vlad was directly involved in product development and engineering. He personally wrote both iOS and backend code, often side by side with the first engineers and designers. 
  
  • Many of the early architectural decisions, some of which still create technical debt today, were made collaboratively between Vlad and the initial team.
  • His co-founder led product and design, sketching screens on a Wacom tablet while Vlad managed engineering. 
• The entire product organization was small enough to fit in a single room, allowing for tight feedback loops between design, engineering, and product decisions.
• Vlad continued contributing code through the company’s hypergrowth phase, writing regularly up until around 2018, when Robinhood reached a $5–10B valuation. At that point, he began shifting from hands-on coding to system-level management but still remained technically involved and maintained a deep understanding of the product’s architecture.

Setting Goals

• Setting Annual Goals: Each December, he writes out what would make the next year a success, both personally and for Robinhood.
  
  • He then compresses everything into one slide. The constraint creates focus and discipline.
    
    • Simplifying means cutting, which often sparks internal debates with teams whose goals don’t make the final list.
  • Annual goals anchor to Robinhood’s financial calendar and serve as the foundation for quarterly objectives.
• Setting Quarterly Goals: Vlad believes it’s productive to think in quarters. They align with earnings cycles and board meetings, and help build accountability to near-term results.
  
  • He builds each quarter’s plan by asking: If I were presenting to the board at the end of the quarter, what slide would make me proud?
  • Roughly half the goals are measurable metrics, while the rest are milestone- or event-based (e.g., successful product launches, major announcements).
  • Teams report progress biweekly. This is frequent enough to track momentum, but not so often that it becomes noise.
• Setting Weekly Goals: Each Friday, he reviews his week and plans the next: 
  
  • In these sessions, he asks himself: what would make next week a good week? This connects his personal time management to company priorities and keeps him close to execution.
  • When possible, he journals daily to review what got done and what needs to happen tomorrow. The practice is lightweight but grounds his attention on what truly moves the needle week by week.

The CEO Should Be Authentic

• Early on, Vlad was preoccupied with how employees viewed him: driving a modest Model 3, staying in cheap hotels, and modeling frugality to reinforce company values.
  
  • While well-intentioned, this focus on optics led to unnecessary self-censorship and stress, as decisions were often made to look humble rather than to be effective.
• The market downturn and stock decline in 2022 forced a mindset reset. He stopped worrying about how his choices might be perceived and began leading with authenticity and internal conviction.
  
  • This led him to realize that projecting humility is less important than making sound, confident decisions that move the company forward.
• Today, Vlad views the fact that he was the company’s creator to be his biggest strength. He deeply cares about Robinhood’s mission and success in a way that’s hard to replicate in a non-founder CEO. 
• He also prides himself on his ability to stay calm under pressure and make decisions without getting emotionally reactive. He views this emotional control as a differentiator among CEOs who often get swayed by stress or ego.

Hire the Best, However You Can

• Hire the best, even part-time. Vlad emphasized that when something isn’t world-class (like an event or product launch), his instinct is to step back and ask who is the best person in the world at this, and can he get them
  
  • For Robinhood’s events, he realized the best creative talent (writers, producers, visual designers) often wouldn’t join full-time but could be hired as consultants. For projects demanding craft excellence, contracting elite specialists is also faster and often cheaper than hiring a full-time executive.
    
    • He hired Neil Strauss as his speechwriter after an introduction from Simon Sinek.
• Vlad noted that these top-tier creatives often prefer consulting over employment and can have outsize impact on short-term, high-visibility projects.
• Don’t expect A+ creative talent to fit startup org structures.
  
  • Pulitzer-level or globally recognized creatives rarely take full-time senior marketing or comms roles at startups.
• Vlad’s chief of staff encourages him to work with people he enjoys collaborating with, even if their styles differ. He believes that humor and energy make intense work sustainable.

Communicating Under Pressure

• In many ways, The GameStop crisis reshaped Vlad’s comms philosophy. Prior to 2021, Vlad wouldn’t have said PR or comms were a strength of his.
  
  • During the 2021 GameStop episode, Elon Musk encouraged Vlad to appear on Clubhouse and transparently walk through what happened, minute by minute.
• The decision was made without legal or marketing approval and was risky but earned massive trust from users and observers.
  
  • His head of marketing and general counsel threatened to quit, but Vlad viewed it as a breakthrough moment in authenticity and founder-led communication.
• The experience made him realize that comms and PR teams often operate defensively with their own agenda. They are focused on risk mitigation and reputation management. Instead, Vlad now works with these teams to find a way to push the agenda he has in mind.

2. Designing a High Performance Culture

Your Culture Should Align with The Outcomes You Want

• Robinhood’s product velocity increased substantially post-2020, driven by a deliberate cultural and organizational reset. 
• The first thing the company did was culturally reset
  
  • Vlad described his early executive team as a “mixed bag,” assembled without a clear understanding of what leadership traits or values the company wanted to optimize for. 
    
    • For example, Vlad didn’t want to work with managers who cared about keeping their employees happy. He felt as though this would make managers territorial over their teams and cause them to get defensive if someone pointed out that one of their reports wasn’t performing well
    • He also felt as though those managers cared about discussing world events, which he didn’t want to set the standard for at Robinhood. Unless the news was impacting their business, he didn’t want teams spending time on it. 
• Their new philosophy was centered around building a high-performance culture 
  
  • Vlad clarified that Robinhood’s values should reflect his own: those of an immigrant family that believed in working until the job is done and never being the blocker. The company began celebrating people who were “hardcore” and committed, not those optimizing for balance.
• Post-2022 he rebuilt the company’s values from scratch. The new framework made performance central to how people are compensated, promoted, and recruited.
  
  • Robinhood changed its compensation and review structure to directly reward delivery and impact. High performers are paid more and promoted faster
• Vlad sees physical proximity as part of a high-performance culture. In his view, great companies are in-person and filled with energy: people staying late, walking over to fix problems together, solving issues in real time. 
  
  • Remote work, he felt, diluted that dynamic and made collaboration slower and less high quality.
  • Vlad emphasized that leaders must believe in what they preach. Encouraging remote work or “wellness” policies that conflicted with his own temperament felt disingenuous. Instead, he aligned the company with how he naturally works best: in person and at a pace where no one is anyone’s blocker. 
• Over time, Vlad came to define culture as a function of three systems that shape behavior and outcomes:
  
  • Who You Hire: Designing mechanisms to consistently attract and select the right kind of people for the company’s stage and values.
  • Who You Reward and Remove: Aligning performance management and incentives so that the people who thrive embody the culture, and those who don’t are systematically managed out.
  • The Work Environment: Deciding what kind of environment people operate in: remote vs. in-person, location strategy, and the social fabric of the office.
• Vlad pushed back on the notion of glorifying overly extreme work cultures (like sleeping in the office). Robinhood’s culture is demanding but not deliberately extractive. He emphasized he wouldn’t ask people to do something he wouldn’t do himself.
  
  • He values intensity and accountability, but within reason: he wants time to see his kids and take Saturdays to think.

In-Office Policy

• Vlad’s current policy for Robinhood’s office culture includes:
  
  • ICs: minimum 3 days per week in-office
  • Managers: 4 days per week
  • Senior leaders (VP + or those personally appointed by Vlad): 5 days per week
• The tiers were inspired by Schwab’s model, which created a visible gradient of commitment: when employees see their managers working harder, complaints fall and compliance rises.
• Vlad resists dictating daily hours (“9-to-7” or similar) because it quickly becomes crude and adversarial.
• Instead, he centers on:
  
  • Aggressive goals that make time expectations self-enforcing.
  • Input tracking and output metrics that reveal productivity without micromanagement.
  • He’s tolerant of flexibility (leaving early for a child’s pickup or working late from home) as long as results stay high and deviations aren’t habitual.
• Vlad doubts that “remote managers” can consistently drive performance at the same level. Co-locating managers and their teams is viewed as the long-term ideal.
• Robinhood also intentionally set their office up in Menlo Park over SF so employees would be less distracted. When candidates ask, the team is pretty explicit about their rationale of wanting to be away from distractions and allows the candidate to decide if they’re a good cultural fit. 

Measuring Employee Productivity

• To sustain a high-performance culture, Robinhood measures productivity across every function, including engineering, with clear, quantitative benchmarks.
• Engineering output is tracked rigorously. The company measures the volume of code written by each engineer and maintains visible leaderboards by department. These metrics enable transparency and identify both high performers and potential bottlenecks.
  
  • Just as support teams are measured by tickets resolved and sales by revenue, engineering is measured by output. Vlad’s philosophy is that every function should have visible, objective productivity measures tied to its work.
  • Pushback is expected, but data wins. Vlad acknowledged that engineers often resist such measurement, arguing metrics like commits or diffs incentivize wrong behavior like writing longer, less efficient code. Vlad believes that imperfect data is better than none. Metrics provide useful signal, and when gaming of the signals occurs, it can be corrected separately.
• Underperformance is addressed directly. When someone falls below average, managers investigate the cause: whether it’s effort, inefficient infrastructure, excessive manual work, or heavy on-call load. The goal is to understand whether the issue stems from process or performance.
• This transparency reinforces accountability and ambition, which are hallmarks of the culture Robinhood aims to preserve as it scales.

Operationalizing RIFs

• Robinhood went from never having done a layoff to treating RIFs (reductions in force) as a core operational muscle
• By late 2021, headcount growth had become self-perpetuating. The company was scaling 30% quarter-over-quarter, and hiring momentum felt unstoppable.
  
  • Vlad admitted he initially doubted whether he could even stop the growth machine, but learned that he could in fact slam the brakes completely when needed.
  • Few executives had ever done layoffs before, revealing a gap in experience at the leadership level. Many came from companies like Google that hadn’t gone through major cuts in years.
• The first RIF in early 2022 was 5% of the company. It was heavily process-driven and legally complex. Leadership spent a Sunday fully reworking the roadmap so that cuts aligned with what the company was going to stop doing. This helped ensure credibility internally following the layoffs.
• Within weeks, it became clear 5% wasn’t enough, leading to a second, much larger RIF. The second RIF (≈25%) was faster and cleaner. By the third, Robinhood had developed a repeatable playbook.
• The finance team began to integrate headcount reviews into quarterly planning. Vlad joked they became “RIF-happy,” turning it into an ongoing performance management process rather than a one-off correction.
• The company shifted from episodic layoffs to a continuous discipline through constant pruning to ensure headcount matched performance and business focus.
  
  • The process brought back tight operational control that had been lost during Robinhood’s hypergrowth phase from 700 to 4,000 employees (much of it remote, with managers who had never met their teams).
  • Vlad believes that ideally, you’d gradually build muscle (scale headcount) while trimming fat (inefficiencies), but in practice, rapid bulking and cutting (overhiring, then trimming) often achieves results faster. Vlad thinks the ideal company is 2,000 amazing people, but sometimes the only way to find them is by hiring 6,000 and identifying the best third through RIFs.

De-Emphasizing Training in Favor of Stretch Work

• Vlad thinks structured programs and training seminars for future managers are rarely worth the time. Instead, he believes growth happens through real work 
• Rather than formal programs, Robinhood develops talent by giving people stretch tasks slightly beyond their current abilities and expecting them to figure it out. He believes employees should be learning on the job, not in workshops.
  
  • Vlad believes that high performers take ownership of their own growth and will proactively seek ways to add value. Managers should support them by providing context and removing blockers, not by running training programs.
• Outside of legally required sessions, Vlad eliminated trainings and leadership offsites. He found that attendees of such programs were rarely top performers and were often the ones with too little real work.
  
  • Vlad discourages the mindset of “I want to manage lots of people” and instead promotes a focus on maximizing impact with as few people as possible.

When to Hire Outside Leaders 

• When bringing in an external leader, assume they will rip something up: change structure, priorities, and process. That’s the point. If you don’t want disruption, you should promote from within.
• Avoid passive leaders. Six months in, if no one can clearly articulate what an external hire has achieved, that’s a red flag. A good outside hire should make their impact visible fast.
• Use outside hires as correction mechanisms. Most external hires happen when something isn’t working internally: when a team has plateaued, lacks credibility with senior candidates, or needs reinvention.
  
  • In rare cases, even high-functioning teams can stagnate; in those cases, a new leader can be brought in deliberately to “shake things up.”

When to Promote Leaders from Within

• Over time, the healthiest orgs promote people who have grown with the company and internalized its values.
  
  • Strong leaders will groom their successors to set a foundation for long-term stability.
• Leaders promoted from within understand the culture, maintain institutional memory, and make transitions smoother for teams
• Promoting strong ICs into management too quickly can backfire. Early at Robinhood, Vlad promoted a top engineer (an intern-turned-manager) who struggled once the org scaled.
  
  • The person couldn’t attract or retain senior hires, creating a credibility gap. Senior employees didn’t want to report to someone far younger.
• In such cases, Robinhood brought in external leadership and tried to repurpose the internal leader, but these transitions are often painful and ended with the original IC eventually leaving
• Vlad is skeptical of executive coaching being able to upskill internally promoted talent. In Robinhood’s early days, manager development was ad hoc and tribal: everyone knew who was performing, and social pressure kept standards high.
  
  • He acknowledged they later added standard tools like Culture Amp and performance reviews, but execution still depends on founder vigilance and peer accountability, not systems alone.

3. Compensation

Employees Don’t Need To Be Coddled

• Vlad believes that many companies, particularly in their early stages, tend to over-index on keeping engineers and high performers happy, often by accommodating personal preferences or avoiding hard conversations. 
  
  • At Robinhood, this mindset was intentionally rejected. As the company scaled, distance made it easier to uphold a performance-driven culture without falling into the trap of over-coddling individuals.
• Within Robinhood, recognition operates less through overt appreciation and more through expectation. Over time, this has become part of the company’s cultural identity: employees understand that not being criticized can itself signal strong performance. 
• Vlad acknowledged that, at scale, he rarely interacts directly with individual contributors, but those moments carry high weight when they happen. Because his time with ICs is limited, simply being in a meeting with him often feels like recognition in itself.

Robinhood’s Founder Community

• Robinhood has built formal systems to celebrate excellence:
  
  • Hood Heroes: A segment at all-hands meetings where individual contributors are publicly recognized for meaningful achievements. The moment is marked by Vlad hitting a large gong and giving recognition of their accomplishments.
  • Founders Community: A top-performer community originally conceived as an elite recognition tier for the top ~5% of employees at Robinhood. 
    
    • Members receive significantly higher equity refreshes (2–4x the standard top-performer band) and are treated as the company’s core builder class. 
      
      • Vlad personally reviews nominations and maintains the list, ensuring it remains around 150 people. This is his “Dunbar’s number” for an effective high-trust community. Founders receive letters, attend private events, and are treated as the people who could rebuild the company “if everything else disappeared.”
    • Vlad reserves the right to add someone to the list at any time, though it’s usually refreshed once a year. He strongly advises founders to maintain direct control over this group for as long as possible.
      
      • Delegating it to execs leads to favoritism: leaders tend to reward their direct reports or take turns distributing it across senior staff to maximize the number of people they make happy instead of truly giving it to the highest-impact individuals.
    • The Founders group must remain a mix of ICs and leaders, not just management.
    • Founders Club members are recognized internally. They receive exclusive perks, merch, and attend annual offsites

Tactic: How Robinhood Compensates its Top Performers 

• Robinhood enforces a clear performance distribution and cadence:
  
  • Performance curve: Managers are expected to identify both top and bottom performers, with roughly 10% in the bottom tier to preserve rigor.
  • Quarterly on-track/off-track reviews: Every employee receives a binary rating from their manager each quarter. Two consecutive “off-track” ratings result in immediate departure. 
    
    • This was implemented at Robinhood to give managers the ability to fire quickly with minimal management
    • The Three Annual Ratings are:
      
      • Below Expectations – Reserved for underperformers who are significantly off-track. 
      • Meets Expectations – The majority of employees fall here. This represents solid, reliable performance but not outsized impact.
      • Exceeds Expectations – The top-performing band, who receive 2x the standard equity refresh. 
      • Founders Community (Top 5%) – This tier sits above “Exceeds Expectations.” Members receive ~4x the standard equity refresh and are treated as the highest-impact contributors in the company.
    • Robinhood’s performance curve puts approximately:
      
      • 10% Below Expectations
      • 50–60% Meets Expectations
      • 20–25% Exceeds Expectations
      • 5% Founders Community (subset of Exceeds)
    • Most companies limit top ratings to 10%, but Robinhood intentionally expands this band to 25% to reward excellence more broadly and avoid mediocrity.
    • The “Exceeds” group gets ~2× equity multipliers, while the Founders Community gets 4-5×.
  • Equity differentiation: The top 5% (Founders Community) receive up to 4x the standard equity refresh rate, while the broader “top performer” tier receives 2x. Base salary remains unchanged; differentiation is equity-based to reinforce long-term ownership.

Compensating for Impact

• Vlad believes most companies underpay their true difference-makers and are too constrained by internal pay bands.
• He views this as essential, not extravagant: if one person materially moves the company’s trajectory, their comp should reflect that magnitude.
  
  • This approach is often resisted by finance leaders who prefer small, incremental raises (e.g., +10%), but Vlad argues that this misses the leverage of exceptional individuals.
• At Robinhood, compensation differentiation happens almost entirely through equity refreshes, not salary. Salaries stay standardized within levels to avoid internal politics.
  
  • His view is that smart, ambitious people want equity, not variable cash. Equity communicates the company’s belief in an employee’s long-term leverage and ownership mentality.
    
    • This system encourages a founder-like mindset: people want to build value, not just extract compensation.
  • Robinhood introduced a cash bonus program when it went public, primarily as a benchmarking exercise, not because it drove motivation.
    
    • Vlad considers it bureaucratic and unnecessary, requiring board approval, KPI debates (e.g., Net Income, EPS, NPS), and complex formulas.
    • He would eliminate it entirely if he could, seeing little evidence that bonuses motivate performance compared to ownership through equity.
• Vlad cautioned against being too flexible with comp at early stages. Over-customizing for individuals creates internal politics and perceptions that talking to the boss equals better pay.
  
  • Instead, clear, tiered systems and centralized control with the CEO prevent misaligned incentives and favoritism.

One-Year vs. Four-Year Equity Grants

• In 2022, Robinhood shifted from four-year to one-year equity grants to reduce stock-based compensation and improve flexibility.
• Contrary to expectations, it had zero impact on hiring. 
  
  • Candidates care most about year-one comp when they’re recruiting, not years two to four. People heavily discount future equity at early stages, so shorter more adjustable grants better match real behavior and performance.
• The team later added longer vesting schedules for promotions and Founder Awards, ensuring that tenure and performance still compound over time.
• Robinhood is now considering extending the default from one to two years to slightly improve retention, since more candidates may now be leaving due to the grant vesting schedule being shorter.

Setting Clear Expectations for Executives

• Vlad noted that most of Robinhood’s best executives have children, but the strongest ones never use family obligations as an excuse for missing critical work.
• At Robinhood, emergencies take priority: if there’s a production issue or major incident, leaders are expected to resolve it immediately, regardless of personal context.
  
  • He clarified that the bar isn’t about overworking but about dependability: when the company truly needs something, leaders figure it out without deflection or delay.

4. Building a Multiproduct Company

Why Robinhood Transitioned to a GM Model

• Robinhood transitioned from a centralized functional org to a general manager model, where each business line has clear ownership across product, engineering, and operations.
  
  • The motivation wasn’t initially to drive speed. Each of Robinhood’s entities (the broker, clearing firm, crypto exchange, etc)  is required by regulators to have defined leadership roles like President and Chief Compliance Officer. Regulators expect those people to hold real authority, not nominal titles while product leads make the actual decisions. 
  • Vlad wanted the company’s operating setup to reflect what was presented to regulators. Rather than having shadow structures where authority was informal, Robinhood formalized decision-making power under each GM, ensuring that those interfacing with regulators were genuinely the ones empowered.
• While the GM transition did improve accountability and velocity, its most meaningful outcome was organizational alignment. Each business now runs as a semi-autonomous unit with clear P&L responsibility and direct ownership of outcomes, reducing bottlenecks and confusion.
  
  • Vlad cautioned that while the GM structure works well in complex, regulated environments, it’s not a universal solution. For Robinhood, it was a pragmatic response to the company’s scale and regulatory obligations 

How the GM Model Works

• Each GM at Robinhood functions as a fully accountable owner of their business line. They are responsible for both strategy and execution across product, engineering, and operations.
  
  • At Robinhood’s scale, framing GMs as “mini CEOs” has been effective. Vlad tells them they are the CEO of their business, and he is their board member. 
    
    • The analogy helps clarify accountability even if, in practice, final authority still sits with him
• Every GM controls their unit’s P&L and is accountable for results. Within each business, the GM oversees a dedicated product leader, engineering leader, and operations/compliance lead, ensuring that all critical functions for execution sit under one umbrella.
  
  • Larger divisions may have sub-GMs managing smaller product areas or feature lines. This layered structure allows for specialization while maintaining clear accountability up to one owner per business line.
• Certain functions remain centralized (brand, design, and growth) because they span the entire company and benefit from shared consistency. 
  
  • Robinhood’s design system, product branding, and performance marketing efforts are coordinated centrally to maintain coherence across all product surfaces.
• The GM model ensures each business can move quickly with local decision-making power, while the central brand and growth teams maintain alignment across the portfolio.
• Robinhood intentionally operates without a traditional Head of Product role
  
  • Instead of a single head of product, each business line (e.g., brokerage, crypto) has its own product leader who reports into the GM. This ensures that decisions stay close to the users and markets each team serves.
• The structure invites healthy debate. When conflicts arise, such as whether a product should get its own app tab or deviate from the design system, they escalate to Vlad. 
  
  • These discussions ensure exceptions to company-wide norms are intentional and justified, not accidental.
• Vlad emphasized that organizational design should never be driven by executive preference. For example, promoting someone to GM or restructuring to retain a specific leader is a dangerous precedent. 

When the GM Model Makes Sense

• Vlad noted the GM model only makes sense once a company reaches significant scale and complexity, typically with multiple independent product lines and P&Ls
  
  • From Series B through D, when there’s effectively one product or business line, the founder is the GM. In this phase, creating GM roles adds unnecessary bureaucracy.

Example: How Robinhood Builds New Business Lines

• Robinhood’s GM structure has evolved organically through a mix of internal development and strategic acquisitions. Each business line emerged at different times and through different paths
• The company started with brokerage in 2015. This was its core trading business and added new verticals gradually as infrastructure and customer behavior allowed. 
  
  • Robinhood’s original brokerage business remains the company’s largest and most complex unit. Several GMs have been developed internally within brokerage, including a GM for Futures, which currently operates under the brokerage umbrella but may eventually become a standalone business.
    
    • Initially, the Futures division focused on traditional products like commodity and index futures, projected to be a steady long-term business. But when regulatory momentum shifted through a surprise Supreme Court ruling enabling political prediction markets Robinhood pivoted quickly.
      
      • Within two weeks, the team launched prediction markets, reusing the same infrastructure built for futures.
      • The team had initially integrated with Kalshi as an exchange partner but pivoted last-minute to integrate with Interactive Brokers after a regulatory delay, completing a process in ten days that competitors had struggled with for years.
      • The result became one of the fastest-growing business launches in Robinhood’s history
• The crypto business followed three years later in early 2018, launched during the aftermath of the 2017 Bitcoin rally. Despite strong interest at launch, the market quickly entered a crypto winter, and activity remained close to zero for years.
• The inflection came in late 2020 when crypto trading volume exploded. In Q4 2020, Robinhood generated ~$20M in crypto revenue; by Q1–Q2 2021, that number surged to roughly $1B, half from Dogecoin trading alone. At the time, crypto was supported by “one and a half engineers,” forcing the entire company to pitch in and help. This period underscored the importance of giving emerging business lines dedicated leadership and resourcing.
• The crypto boom made it clear that functional ownership wasn’t enough and each line needed autonomy. Crypto became Robinhood’s first fully independent GM-run business. This was later replicated across other units.
• After crypto, Robinhood built Money, its banking and payments arm, to deepen its role as customers’ primary financial platform. The company also acquired teams and infrastructure in that category, using M&A to accelerate vertical integration.
  
  • The Money business line began as a product area within the broader product organization around 2020. When Robinhood transitioned to a GM model, it became one of the company’s three original core GMs. The company later acquired X1, a credit card startup, and its CEO Deepak Rao became GM of the Money division
    
    • Beyond X1, Robinhood has also acquired and integrated Bitstamp Trade, PMR (an advisory platform), and several smaller financial technology firms, expanding both geographic reach and product breadth.

Evolution Toward a Multi-Product Strategy

• Robinhood’s shift toward becoming a multi-product platform evolved naturally from user demand and product adjacency.
• The first expansion, options trading, came quickly because users were asking for it. It was a natural extension rather than a strategic leap.
• From there, the goal became to build a multi-product company that goes deep in each line, not just wide. 
  
  • Vlad contrasted Robinhood’s approach with other fintechs that offer a long list of surface-level products (peer-to-peer payments, savings, basic investing, and limited crypto) without meaningful depth. Robinhood’s aim became to pair the variety of a platform company with the rigor of a category leader.

Philosophy on Launching New Products

• In contrast to many B2B or fintech companies that treat new product launches as incremental additions for existing users, Robinhood aims to make each launch a distinct on-ramp into the ecosystem.
  
  • While most new features initially gain traction with current customers (often more than 90% of early adoption) success is defined by the product’s ability to attract new users who join specifically for that offering.
    
    • Vlad noted that only a few products have achieved this true new user pull:
      
      • Crypto was the first, with Dogecoin serving as a breakout driver when Robinhood became the only accessible place to trade it.
      • The Gold Card has since proven to be another major user-acquisition engine, appealing to a broader demographic seeking premium financial rewards.
      • Prediction Markets are emerging as the third example, drawing in a new generation of users interested in event-based trading and political outcomes.
  • This approach reflects a balance between compounding the existing customer base and continuously widening the funnel. Each new product must serve both as a retention tool and as a magnet for new users.

Deciding What Products to Bet On

• Robinhood’s approach revolves around building obvious products in massive markets and winning through execution and differentiation, not novelty
  
  • Most of Robinhood’s major product lines (brokerage, crypto, banking) were chosen because the product-market fit was not in question. 
    
    • For example, brokerage was always a valuable service. There was no issue with the size of the market. It was solely a question of if they could execute well enough to win. The same logic applied to crypto and banking: these are large, enduring categories where success depends on user experience, trust, and cost, not on whether demand exists.
  • Vlad compared Robinhood’s approach to Apple’s. They are usually not first to market, but best to package and scale. Robinhood enters categories late but focuses on consumerizing and democratizing what already works, often by lowering cost, improving UX, and leveraging its existing scale. Brokerage, crypto, and banking all followed this pattern.
• With crypto, there was debate over whether crypto would succeed as a payment system or infrastructure layer. Vlad saw the opportunity differently. He saw Robinhood as a trading app, and crypto as a superior trading product given it was infinitely divisible, 24/7, and global. 
• Even when early launches underperformed, Robinhood rarely scrapped them outright. Instead, they reworked the approach until they found the right fit, as with their banking products, which took multiple iterations before achieving traction.

Balancing Resources Across Bets

• Vlad described Robinhood’s investment philosophy as relative and adaptive. It is calibrated not by fixed timelines or budgets, but by the opportunity cost of other bets and the company’s ability to keep optionality open.
  
  • In the case of crypto, Robinhood neither went all-in nor pulled the plug during the long bear market. While Coinbase continued investing heavily with hundreds of engineers, Robinhood maintained the business with roughly half an engineer, just enough to keep the systems running and retain optionality. That restraint proved pivotal when the market turned in 2020–2021, allowing Robinhood to scale rapidly into a $1B revenue line without having to rebuild from scratch.
• Vlad explained that every new product investment is contextual and not about absolute dollars but tradeoffs. 
  
  • A smaller investment in a speculative business might make sense if it preserves flexibility, while a larger commitment could be justified when there’s a clear path to user demand or regulatory advantage.

Differentiation Matters More than Distribution

• Over time, Vlad has become convinced that differentiation matters more than distribution. A common internal fallacy, he said, was assuming that users of one Robinhood product would automatically use another. In reality, it’s pretty easy to download another app.
  
  • Friction and differentiation must balance. The harder it is for a user to adopt or switch, the more differentiated the product needs to be:
• High friction requires high differentiation. Banking, for instance, has huge switching costs (moving bills, direct deposits), so the experience must be meaningfully better.
• Low friction can lead to fast adoption. Products like credit cards and trading are easy to try and discard, making them ideal for rapid growth if they’re compelling.
• Robinhood’s early success in trading came from being low friction to try with high differentiation by offering users a simple, zero-commission model that users could adopt instantly without risk.

Pros of Being Multiproduct

• Vlad acknowledged that deciding how much to invest in new business lines versus doubling down on core products is one of the hardest strategic questions Robinhood faces and is one that’s constantly revisited.
• Rather than viewing new business units like crypto, banking, or prediction markets as distractions, Vlad sees them as mutually reinforcing layers. 
  
  • If you ask their crypto GM, what the best feature is against Coinbase is he’d probably point to Robinhood’s brokerage business. The ability for customers to trade both stocks and crypto in one place is a powerful differentiator and something single-focus competitors like Coinbase can’t replicate.
• Robinhood’s expansion is guided by shared user intent rather than by category. Traders tend to move fluidly across asset classes and Robinhood’s goal is to meet that same customer wherever their curiosity or conviction takes them. 
• Multi-product depth drives higher stickiness and customer lifetime value. Vlad believes that this is why Robinhood’s retention is ~2x as high as competitors. The integrated experience from earning interest on idle cash to investing across markets makes it harder for users to leave.

Cons of Being Multiproduct

• Competing against focused, single-line companies (like Coinbase in crypto or Kalshi in prediction markets) is difficult. Mono-line competitors can build brand purity and category dominance whereas Robinhood must divide attention across many verticals.
  
  • The tradeoff revolves mainly around brand clarity vs. customer retention. Robinhood’s advantage is its integrated platform. Users can trade, save, invest, and bet all in one place.  This makes retention and monetization stronger than in narrower products.
  • But with multiple lines, Robinhood risks being seen as a generalist rather than a category leader in any single domain.
• Similar to Amazon Prime, Robinhood Gold serves as the umbrella brand for their “all-in-one” value prop. Users want Robinhood Gold: the best deal in financial services. And then they upsell them all the discounts and deals on our other things.
• Although the company has occasionally used the phrase “all-in-one financial platform” in its marketing, this framing hasn’t always proven most effective. Campaigns perform better when they highlight a single, differentiated value that resonates with a user’s direct interest. 
  
  • For example, the marketing around prediction markets succeeded by focusing on a tangible, specific promise (sports betting in California) rather than abstractly emphasizing comprehensiveness.

‍