Robinhood has enjoyed a far more stable ride on the latest meme stock wave, an improvement that CEO
Tenev, 37, recently discussed Robinhood's evolution and the challenges of running a publicly held company that has seen its stock price fall about 40% below its
Q: How are you feeling about the investing environment now compared to a few years ago?
A: I felt a little nervous in 2021. Not only were we growing so quickly that I didn’t think our infrastructure could handle it, but we were also spending so much of our resources just trying to keep up with our growth that we couldn’t really build new products that would serve as our next growth drivers. The foundation is much better now. You are seeing this with the latest meme stock frenzy. Not only are we reliable and up, but we are one of the few places where you can trade these things 24 hours a day. That’s a huge differentiator.
Q: Have you and the company also become smarter?
A: We have learned a ton of lessons. The first lesson I learned is you should not go down and have infrastructure issues. That’s a hard lesson, but we have made a lot investments so we are doing pretty well now. The other lesson is to be much more proactive about what’s happening. I have been on social media a lot more. I think that communication muscle is much more developed.
Q: Are you trying to do any financial education with customers?
A: One is just informing people about things like back in 2022 when we were in the news a lot because people were using Robinhood to buy bankrupt stocks. Some people made a lot of money doing that and, in hindsight, that ended up being a good trade. But we don’t want people trading it without knowing it’s bankrupt. So we added a lot of things to the product like, “This company has declared bankruptcy, so watch out.” I don’t know if you call that education, but it’s contextual content that helps people make sure they are informed.
Q: What are the demographics of your core customer base?
A: We have 24 million customers with money in their accounts in the
Q: What about the recent notice from the
A: I really think that it’s regulatory overreach. There’s regulation by enforcement happening. We worked with (the
Q: What has it been like making the transition from being a founder running a startup to being CEO of a publicly held company?
A: It was definitely a learning experience. We have had to adapt the business and do a lot of hard things that were painful. I had some earnings calls that were not fun. At the end of the day, there were some really good things that maybe we wouldn’t have done if we were private that we ended up doing, helping make us a stronger company. It has made me better as a human being and as an executive. I wouldn’t take it back for sure.
—-
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
, source