Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev says investing for a living could replace labor in a post-AI world

Listen to the episode or read the transcript below.

Vlad Tenev: So I think it’s going to become more important to invest, because if you can’t rely on labor to generate money to make a living, capital becomes more important. And so we’re going to have to make it easier for people to learn about investing. Invest from an early age, get their kids investing. And I think it’s going to be private industry like Robinhood, and also the government that’s gonna have to step in. And I think you’re seeing the beginnings of this shift with the Invest America Act.

Diane Brady: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Leadership Next. The podcast about the people…

Kristin Stoller: …and trends…

Brady: …that are shaping the future of business. I’m Diane Brady.

Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.

Brady: And this week we have Robinhood.

Stoller: Yes, Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood. I remember, I got my start as a financial reporter, Diane, back in 2016 and they were like the scrappy, young upstart. Two young guys, but they’ve been through a lot since then.

Brady: Well, we know that many people know him, of course, from the movie “Dumb Money”, where he is sort of the “bro” guy, and not necessarily the hero of that story.

Stoller: No, not a flattering depiction by Sebastian Stan.

Brady: And then goes straight into a financial crisis, basically, where, certainly in this period of high inflation, stocks were going down. They had gone public. There were questions about whether Robinhood would even continue to exist.

Stoller: Oh, absolutely. And I think the social media and public hate on Robinhood, on Reddit, on YouTube, on a ton of different platforms, was so fascinating because of what happened back in January 2021 when they restricted trading of GameStop. In fact, in the Stoller household during the pandemic, we had to ban the word GameStop because we had to stop the debates on it and what was going on.

Brady: Stop all that money flowing from the Stoller household. Well, look, now they’re back. Our colleague, Jeff John Roberts, did a terrific cover story on this fact. This is a company that has come back from the brink and has expanded. They’re into wealth management, credit cards, crypto trading, stock trading, deposits, you name it. It’s almost like they want to do everything.

Stoller: And you and I have talked to so many financial CEOs. MasterCard, we had Bank of America, and all of them are fighting for kind of a piece of this, doing very similar things.

Brady: Well, wealth in particular is a growth market, partly because there’s this massive wealth transfer that’s happening as people bring wealth to the next generation. He is going to potentially be one of the big recipients of that, because he really does skew to millennials and Gen Z. And I think this is a new day for crypto, of course, and this is a man who’s been to the White House several times. I can’t wait to ask him about that.

Stoller: Absolutely. We’ll be back with him after the break.

Brady: Jason Girzadas, CEO of Deloitte US and sponsor of this podcast, joins us now to talk about maximizing business transformation with AI agents.

Jason Girzadas: Great to see you, Diane. Nice to be here.

Brady: So what should CEOs consider as they assess and prioritize use cases for AI agents?

Jason Girzadas: I think if this is on the topic of every CXO conversation I’m a part of, and I think the thought process has to be looking for high impact areas that may not be necessarily the most glamorous or high profile functional areas, but are ripe for automation and use of this technology to create efficiencies as well as innovation. And over time, AI agents will be also in customer-facing and growth-oriented domains. In our case, Deloitte, we’re using it within our finance organization, looking at very mundane processes like expense management and working capital management. We’re seeing other organizations use it in call centers and with software development that can be automated.

Stoller: What are the key elements for successfully implementing AI agents?

Jason Girzadas: Yeah, it comes down to intentionality. And so I think that intentionality in going functional area by functional area, in concert with business and IT leadership in an enterprise. It needs to be a mainstream business planning effort that’s budgeted, KPIs are developed, and there’s real accountability for actual business outcomes and impact because of agentic capabilities.

Brady: Fascinating stuff. Thanks, Jason,

Stoller: Thank you.

Jason Girzadas: Thank you.

Stoller: Vlad, so I got my start in business journalism as a personal finance reporter way back in 2016, so I have been following Robinhood for many years. Seeing you go from this kind of really scrappy upstart to now where you are taking on these big financial institutions, and you’ve had quite a ride, quite a history. You’ve had a lot of ups, lots of downs, and you’ve been really in the cultural zeitgeist, I feel like, in the past couple years, of course, with the whole GameStop thing. Then this movie comes out,“Dumb Money.” So I guess, because we’re a leadership podcast, I want to start off with some lessons that you took away from the last few years as a leader. So I guess my first question is looking back on, you know, January 2021, everything that happened with GameStop, restricting trading of meme stocks on Robinhood—is there anything that you would have done differently today that you look back on and think, I wish I’d done that in that moment?

Tenev: I think I was in my camel stage of leadership back then, you know the camel—I think Nietzsche talked about how in the evolution of a person, you go through many stages, and the camel is the first one. And the camel is known for taking on a big burden and seeking to carry heavier and heavier weight. And I think that was really, up until recently, kind of how I felt. I felt like leadership was just taking on the biggest burden and showing everyone that you can, like, carry it without it breaking your back. And I think that’s necessary, actually. I think you have to eat glass and really prove to yourself and the world that you can do that before you can kind of move on to other things.

Brady: I feel like a camel is a horse designed by committee. Have you heard that one before as well?

Tenev: Well, it depends on which one you’re talking about. Is it the one humped camel or the two humped?

Brady: I don’t, I don’t know, but let’s go back, and I do want to double down on some of the lessons you’ve learned, but let’s remind people what business you’re in, to Kristin’s point. You cover now—you’ve got wealth management, you’ve got, of course, you’re in the crypto business, in addition to being in the trading business. Give us a full sense of what you are and what you want to be.

Tenev: Yeah, Robinhood is a consumer financial services company. We started—our niche was trading, self directed trading and investing. And we really basically innovated across two axes. One was cost. So we brought down the cost of trading from around $10 per transaction down to zero, and that was a big disruptive change. Actually, the entire industry had to replicate that model, and the ones that weren’t able to do it, big companies in 2019 could no longer survive as standalone entities. So TD AmeriTrade, for example, big brokerage house that’s been around for many, many years, ended up folding into Charles Schwab. E-Trade, which was very much the poster child of retail trading during the dotcom boom, got gobbled up by Morgan Stanley, and is no longer an independent company. And I think in large part that was because they had to lower their commissions to zero to respond to the disruptive force of Robinhood entering the market from the low end, and just didn’t have the cost structure or the ability to compete with that as standalone companies. And the other axes was really just mobile. I think we were the first ones to adopt mobile as our primary platform, and we kind of made a bet that that would become the main tool for all of your financial needs. And I think back when we made that bet, it was contrarian, but now it just seems obvious. I mean, our phones are with us all the time. We do everything on our phones, so of course, we would do financial services as well. So I think it was those things, but over time, we’ve expanded. We’ve really built relationships with customers across broader financial needs. We’ve got a great credit card. Obviously, I’m biased, but I do believe it’s the best credit card on the market by a considerable margin.

Brady: Why?

Tenev: Two reasons: 3% cash back on all categories, which you can’t even get close to with other products, and a great mobile user interface. And that’s evolving into a broader banking offering, which we announced a few months ago, which I think will be the best banking offering on the market. It’s already looking really good internally, but you won’t have to go to a bank branch or an ATM, for example. The cash will be delivered to you, which I think is very awesome. And then we also announced wealth management across multiple areas. We have digital advice with Robinhood Strategies.

Brady: I’m trying to imagine that my money is managed by Robinhood. There’s something about that sentence that just makes people pause, right?

Tenev: Well, I do think at first it would have seemed strange to people, because very much the impression was Robinhood was a newbie investing app. But I think over time, the brand becomes what people use you for, and people have been using Robinhood for more and more things. And I think we’ll get to a point where it’ll seem antiquated to have your money managed by anything other than Robinhood. It’ll be like, oh, you know you’re still using AOL, almost.

Stoller: I think that when you started your brand was really all about young people who are really disillusioned with the way Wall Street was going and the way the traditional banking system was, is that still your demographic—capturing young people, or what is it?

Tenev: Well, we’re a little bit older now, millennials.

Stoller: We are, I am one.

Tenev: Yeah, I think that to some degree, Robinhood started catering to millennials, but has adapted to Gen Z. So Gen Z does use the product quite a bit. We do well there, and part of the focus is, we do always want to be relevant to the next generation, because you don’t want to get stuck as a generational company like our predecessors, because eventually those people will not be around, or, you know, maybe they will be, but that becomes a problem if you just are relevant for a period of time. So we always try to stay attuned to the needs of the next generation.

Brady: What’s different? I’m Gen X, since we’re talking generations here, why would I not use Robinhood? Why do you not appeal to me?

Brady: Since we’re talking about generations, let’s go back to the very beginning. Vlad, your parents were at the World Bank. Tell us a little bit about what drew you to this field in the first place: what was the aha moment you and your cofounder had?

Tenev: Yeah, so my cofounder and I met at Stanford, and we had both independently come to Stanford to study physics, actually. And the reason we studied physics was we were interested in the big questions: what happened before the Big Bang? Why does the universe work the way it does? Why is there gravity? Why? So those were the questions that appealed to us. And then we got into mathematics, because to really understand physics, the underlying structure of it is just mathematics. So we had to get good at that. And I went to graduate school down at UCLA to work with a famous professor there by the name of Terry Tao. He was a Fields Medalist, one of the best mathematicians in the world. Still is. And my first month on the job in grad school, Lehman Brothers went under. So it was the start of the global financial crisis, and Baiju, who was my good friend and cofounder, subsequently, he was at a hedge fund in Marin County, north of San Francisco, and he called me several times, repeatedly, and he was actually, it was the opposite. He was like, this company that I’m at is doing really interesting stuff. They’ve computerized everything, and they’re taking advantage of all of these mispricings in the market. So when there’s a market crash, like 2008, most financial services companies do very poorly. The economy is tanking, and the conventional wisdom is that you don’t want to be anywhere near finance, except if you’re a financial company that’s taking advantage of mispricings, because there’s a lot of mispricings, and they had this one strategy where they had a network between Canada and New York, and they were trading the same exact stock in both places, and they were just buying it.

Brady: Arbitrage.

Brady: How old were you?

Tenev: I was 22, yeah. And we drove across the country to New York to start a trading venture. And, yeah, that’s how the entrepreneurial journey began, and that sort of, you could tie that to the origins of Robinhood, because that’s how we kind of understood—ultimately, that business failed. You know, our trading venture was not successful, but we learned how the markets worked, and then later we were able to inhabit these two worlds, where we understood trading out here, and then we came from Stanford, so we were sort of like in the middle of mobile and all this technology, and we kind of put the two together.

Stoller: Well, I think that’s your thesis, and correct me if I’m wrong, was that you wanted to make trading more accessible to young people and those who’d never really gotten a hand in it, unless they had a financial advisor or someone like that, right?

Tenev: Yeah, that was part of it, for sure. I think the origin of it really was, you know, we were engineers, we were mathematicians, and we thought from first principles about why a trade had to cost $10. And you actually break down all the components of the trade, you know, the clearing, the execution, the brokerage services, and you find out that you could actually offer it for pennies, right? And once we realized that, we were like, well, that’s a pretty big opportunity. If you take something that others are charging $10 for, and we can actually break it down and offer it for pennies, we probably don’t have to be very good at anything else. But if we can just deliver that, it could be a pretty big company.

Brady: So Kristen mentioned this at the start, and I do want to talk about where you are now and where you’re going, but I want to say you’re best known still for that GameStop episode. Let’s remind people a little bit of, you know, I saw the movie. Let’s start there. How do you feel you were portrayed in the movie version of this whole…

Tenev: …well, I thought they chose a very attractive man to play me. So I was happy about that. They had so many scenes—in like, three-quarters of the scenes, he was shirtless in the bathroom.

Brady: Yeah, there you are, working out again.

Brady: You could have been a slob doing cocaine or something like that.

Brady: …as one does…

Brady: Let’s remind—what was the role that you played. So GameStop, that is one, the whole sort of meme stop phenomenon. Talk a little bit about the role that Robinhood played, because, in some respects, the platform was vilified during that period. Was it fairly or unfairly?

Tenev: Unfairly.

Brady: Okay, so tell us about that.

Brady: …the wisdom of the crowd becomes the stupidity of the crowd…

Tenev: …Yeah. I wouldn’t maybe go that far, but it was definitely a strange time. So essentially, you know, people on social media were talking about individual stocks and just sort of like buying them up. And one of those was GameStop. There was also, you know, Nokia, I think was very popular. AMC, of course. It tended to be these names of these companies that had been disrupted by technology to some degree. And I think there was an element of nostalgia about it. There was also a narrative of, okay, well, maybe the government is not stepping in to protect these companies so retail could come in and sort of like keep them going while the pandemic runs out. So anyway, there were probably multiple causes, and effectively it got so extreme that all of the risk controls market-wide, that were instituted, actually, many of them were instituted in 2008 to prevent another financial crisis. They sort of like fired on this GameStop thing, and that led to Robinhood and pretty much every other brokerage enacting trading restrictions, and those restrictions basically allowed customers to close their existing positions but not open up new ones. And those were both, you know, options positions, stock positions. It was basically risk-reducing trades only, and I think on social media, which, as I mentioned before, people were already getting a little crazy. This was sort of portrayed as a ploy by the government and these companies to shut down trading and prevent the little guy from from making money.

Stoller: And you got some really violent backlash, I feel like, from people. That must have been scary. How did you handle that personally, and, were you looking at it as more of like, I wish I communicated with the users more about this or what was going through your mind at the time?

Brady: So our colleague, Jeff John Roberts, did a piece earlier this year, and it’s really about the remarkable, I wouldn’t say turnaround, but you have been on a tear lately, in a good way, of course. And talk about where have been the best sources of growth for you? And I’m really curious. You know, I don’t want to say Prague Spring, because that implies it’s temporary, but crypto is having a moment right now, thanks to Washington and such. But what do you think have been the real drivers of the business in the last year or two?

Stoller: And right after you went public too.

Brady: …something like Eric Schmidt for Google…

Tenev: …yeah, some real—the CEOs that people write about. What would they do? If they were unburdened by decisions that we had made, and we had a list of things. We were like, “Okay, well, they would probably get people back into the office as much as possible, unwind this remote work stuff. They would unfortunately have to cut expenses. They would allocate all of our resources to our highest revenue, most valuable initiatives.” And I think our new business strategy came out of that. And our business strategy now is we have sort of like these three pillars that act on three different time horizons. In the short term, we’re going to be the number one platform for the Active Trader market. And that’s just, you can think of that as almost like our Tesla Roadster. It’s a niche market, active traders, but they generate a lot of revenue, and they like to be at the forefront of technology and innovation. So these are the people that have their six screens. Maybe you can think of them as having Bloomberg terminals, lots of information, and they’re just like plugged in. They’re plugged into the mainframe. They are trading, and they’re, you know, semi-professional. So an important market for us, but not everyone is a trader. Which brings to our second arc, which we call number one in wallet share for the next generation. And that’s really about serving the totality of your financial needs. Can we do your banking? Can you deposit your paycheck in Robinhood, do all of your spending with us, have your retirement savings, your long term savings, and, of course, your discretionary investing? And that also serves to diversify the business. So that’s where Robinhood Gold, which is our subscription offering, came in.

Brady: $250? Well that’s the cap on what you get.

Brady: We’re in AI era, right? 10-month plan?

Tenev: Yeah, the 10-year arc, I call it the number one global financial ecosystem. And so that involves Robinhood growing across two independent vectors. One is U.S.-only to fully global. We want to be available in every country in the world. And the other is retail only to business and institutional. So you shouldn’t just be able to use Robinhood as an individual, but if you have a small business, if you have a large business, we should be able to handle all of your financial needs as well. And I think that takes the addressable opportunity into…I mean, it’s orders of magnitude bigger.

Stoller: That makes a lot of sense. And you just described coming through a rough two years to get to this point where you are now. GameStop, 2022 markets, and you were facing a lot of online hate at the time. Was there ever a moment where you felt like, I’m out as CEO, I’m gonna quit. This is it for me. This is my limit.

Brady: Any good advice that you received, in general, since to be a CEO is also a learned craft. I’m curious who you’ve gone to for advice and what they’ve told you?

Brady: What hasn’t worked?

Stoller: Why not?

Tenev: I think that what we did there was we built an offering targeting more of like the paycheck-to-paycheck, lower income consumer. But actually most people that use Robinhood are higher income because you need to have a little bit more money to invest, right? And so those tend to be credit card primary. Once you basically start using a credit card, you’re not going to go back to a debit card. It’s sort of a one way door. And so we built a product for lower income inside a service that was primarily, you know, our best customers were higher income or slightly higher than that. And so we learned from that, and we ended up launching the Robinhood Gold Card, which is the 3% cash back credit card that I was telling you about earlier. You know, that led to the private banking offering, which really targets the higher end of the. So in a sense, it wasn’t directly successful. I mean, it did okay, but we learned from that, and actually, the failures and shortcomings of that product led us to kind of retool and launch another one shortly after that that’s been much more successful.

Stoller: I think another one of your and my favorite topics, Diane, is regulation. I feel like we should take a shot.

Stoller: Exactly. So I think my question for you, Vlad, coming out of 2021, how are you ensuring that Robinhood is prepared for any future regulatory and clearing house challenges going forward with this new administration too?

Brady: And opportunities, too. Let’s not forget the word opportunity.

Tenev: I think that in the previous administration with Gary Gensler at the SEC, we were very much in a defensive posture.

Tenev: Our entire business. There was crypto, which was, as you guys know, basically they were trying to delete crypto from the U.S., and there was also market structure. So they were trying to effectively stop self-directed retail trading, which affected our core brokerage business with a slew of poorly motivated market structure reforms. And then there was what they called predictive data analytics, which effectively would curb the use of technology, including AI, from financial services. So, yeah, it was sort of like an attack on these three fronts that were, I thought, anti-innovation, fundamentally. I mean, when you say we don’t want technology to be used in financial services and people should just engage in in-person financial services. It’s not only antiquated, in my opinion, but it also disadvantages the people that can’t afford in-person advice, because that’s expensive. So I was glad to see that change. I mean, when the new administration came in, the immediate impact was just like the cessation of all this just assault on our business and the industries that we operate in. And then we got into a strange—suddenly we don’t have to spend the bulk of our resources defending ourselves, and instead, we have an administration that wants the U.S. to win in crypto and all these frontier industries like artificial intelligence, and we kind of had to figure out how to operate in that environment, which we’re still learning, but we’re definitely engaged in Washington in a big way. I mean, I’ve been to the White House several times just this year, and I was not invited to the White House in the previous administration. I don’t think they cared too much to deal with me. But, you know, there’s this Invest America Initiative, which is very exciting, and this is in the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” in the reconciliation bill. And it’s, it’s probably one of the…

Tenev: It rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it.

Tenev: Yeah. Well, this part, the Invest America Act is probably one of the least controversial—basically both sides agree, but it would give every child born in the country $1,000 in an investment account that would compound over time and really get them invested in the markets. So we talked about that. Obviously, we’ve been involved in the crypto…

Brady: What do you think about meme coins? I know Circle had a great IPO with stablecoins, but the world of crypto continues to be a little enigmatic for me. Is there a place for memecoins?

Tenev: I think memecoins are an early example of an immensely powerful technology. So the idea that you can actually create a coin in less than five minutes and have it deployed across a network of global exchanges, attract billions of dollars of liquidity from hundreds of millions of people globally, is probably the most powerful innovation in capital markets since the creation of the order book, I would say. Now I think memecoins, a lot of people get distracted, because, to some degree these are speculative assets that aren’t tied to real world utility, but the technology is incredibly powerful. And I think the future is that same technology that makes it easy to deploy a meme coin, will be plugged into the existing securities framework, and so you can have what we call tokenized real world assets that live on blockchains that tap into that liquidity and trade real time, 24/7.

Tenev: Real world assets, yeah. I think stocks will be on blockchains. Private companies like SpaceX and OpenAI will be on blockchains. And in that sense, this technology, that kind of seems like a little bit of a joke now, will become an infrastructure layer underlying the most serious financial instruments that we have.

Stoller: Interesting. I want to talk about the everyday retail investor. I know they make up a lot of your customer base. What have you learned about them, you know, since the GameStop episode? What do they want following all this backlash, and what changes have you made with Robinhood because of it?

Tenev: Yeah, I think one thing that I believe, that maybe isn’t commonly believed, is that investing and trading are skills that need to be practiced in order to be improved. I think it’s—I draw this analogy: it’s more akin to playing the violin than learning biology, right?

Tenev: If you’re playing the violin, that’s true. But with no commissions. I think the charges are less, but I think..

Tenev: Yes. Well, you only get charged those if you make money.

Tenev: Yeah. Dulls the impact a little bit. It’s possible to improve. I think there’s people that have been doing it for a long time and have gotten very, very sophisticated. Our customers have gotten very sophisticated. They have data pipelines where they collect all this information, and there’s been this new phenomenon of retail investors analyzing stocks. And you see them on YouTube and X, and they post these in depth videos where they go into all the details of a company’s financial statement, balance sheet, the news, the stock price movement and the technicals. And there’s been this story that retail investors are unsophisticated. They don’t know what they’re doing. Some of these retail investors are more sophisticated than the professional analysts, which I think is pretty amazing.

Brady: You know, one of the things that people love anytime we’re talking to leaders, is just, I almost call it life hacks. You’ve got kids, obviously, you’ve got a very demanding job. Let me start with, where do you get the most joy out of your job? I mean, can you give me some sense of what you love most about it and what you would change?

Tenev: Yeah, yeah. That’s an interesting question. I think my wife would not like–she doesn’t like it when I say this–but I actually prefer it when my work life and my personal life blends. You know, it’s sort of like the anti-Severance.

Tenev: I think they should just blend, and then it’s just life. Because I think conventionally, people felt like work was something they had to do, and there was this sharp divide of, okay, I’m working. It’s kind of a drag. I don’t really like what I’m doing, but I’m making money so that I could have fun when I retire, or, you know, when I come home or on the weekends, but I like what I do. I think I’m at the point where if I don’t like what I do, I could be doing something else. And so it’s sort of everything’s just life. I like making contributions, being productive, and the two sort of merge, but, you know, not ideal for the kids when they have to go to the office and, like, hang out with me while I’m in meetings.

Brady: I hung out with my parents at work, I enjoyed it.

Stoller: Yeah, that’s why I became a journalist.

Tenev: Well, I think that there’s an interesting thing that’s happening in this country, which I like to talk about sometimes, and it’s big. It’s the, I call it the great wealth transfer. And the numbers just keep getting bigger. This money is going to move, and I don’t really think too many people are thinking about this, but that asset flow is going to be continuous and accelerating. And, you know, it’s going from folks that did most of their financial services in-person with, you know, physical brokers, to people that are much more digitally native. And I think that’s going to have a huge impact. And I don’t think the incumbents are really thinking about that. I think that’s going to be a big thing, and we have to make financial services work sensibly for the entire family. And I think that’s what we’ve been working towards with banking, with the credit card offerings, and, of course, with investments.

Tenev: I do worry generally about the short-term impacts of AI on the labor market. I think that, you know, in the next five to 10 years, if you believe some of the optimistic estimates for the GDP growth and what it takes to get that, you know, six plus percent GDP growth if we’re in the bullish AI adoption scenario, there’s going to be a lot of labor force disruption. And I think that’s actually a huge tailwind for the importance of retail investing. So I think it’s going to become more important to invest, because if you can’t rely on labor to generate money to make a living, capital becomes more important. And so we’re going to have to make it easier for people to learn about investing. Invest from an early age, get their kids investing. And I think it’s going to be private industry like Robinhood, also the government that’s going to have to step in. And I think you’re seeing the beginnings of this shift with the Invest America Act. I think the best way to actually get ourselves ready for this is to encourage people becoming owners of private industry and the American stock markets and our best companies from as early of an age as possible, because investing in things and capital, I think, is going to continue to be important, and the value of labor and working for money is—there’s a lot of question marks. I mean, some people say that we’ll create all sorts of new jobs, but I think the AI revolution is a little bit different, because in the past, intelligence was always sort of owned by humans, by people, and we’ve relied on intelligence to create new jobs. But if the intelligence is being-if humans comprise less than 1% of the total intelligence out there, I think you’ll have entrepreneurship, but there will be big, big disruption, to say the least, and so encouraging investment is a big way to combat that/

Tenev: I mean, I think there’s two big transformative forces that are currently working their way through the financial system, and it’s crypto and artificial intelligence. I have a feeling, somehow, surprisingly, I think we’ll be fine with AI. I think that it’s moving so fast, and everyone seems keen to not really regulate it at this point. Maybe at some point that’ll happen. But the models that we have now are already at, you know, 130, 140+ IQ. So there’s probably just a lot that can be done deploying the existing models that exist. With cryptom there’s the stable coin bill that’s continuing to be ping-ponged back and forth between the Senate and the House, and that should get through. There’s market structure, which should get through as well. And I think some work will need to be done that guarantees that, but I think that’s an inevitability as well. Just because it’s so global, crypto is sort of like the internet. It’s available to anyone with a smartphone, so it’s going to be hard to not embrace that eventually.

Brady: Any last words, advice, for entrepreneurs? I know you’ve got plenty of advice for investors. What’s your advice for entrepreneurs?

Tenev: I don’t think entrepreneurs, the best ones, won’t listen to my advice anyway. I think, you know, I always get this advice, focus on one thing, don’t get too distracted. And I think that the best entrepreneurs in my experience try to figure things out for themselves. So I would just say, run experiments, learn from things, try to iterate as quickly as is responsible. You don’t want to iterate too quickly. You always have to be responsible. But yeah, I think it’s going to be the best time to be an entrepreneur in the next 10 years. So also just get started while you’re young.

Tenev: Thank you.

Brady:Leadership Next is produced and edited by Ceylan Ersoy.

Stoller: Our executive producer is Lydia Randall.

Stoller: Our theme is by Jason Snell.

Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.

Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune‘s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcasters and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.