Vlad Tenev

Things Vlad Says on Podcasts

Chief executive of Robinhood, the retail brokerage that pushed zero-commission trading into the mainstream and now offers prediction markets and tokenized shares of private companies. Frequent guest on business and tech shows, including the a16z Podcast, Squawk on the Street, TBPN, Earn Your Leisure, 20VC and Bankless.

Where to Find Them

Vlad Tenev writes a16z Podcast . They have also been a guest on Squawk on the Street (8 times) , Earn Your Leisure (5 times) , TBPN (5 times) , Squawk Pod (4 times) , The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch (4 times) , The Exchange (3 times) , Bankless (3 times) , Market Mondays (3 times) , Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer (2 times) , All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg (2 times) , Odd Lots (2 times) , This Week in Startups (2 times) , Bloomberg Intelligence (2 times) , Unchained (2 times) , Top Traders Unplugged , No Priors , Wall Street Week , Training Data , Equity , Summation with Auren Hoffman , The Wolf Of All Streets , Raoul Pal: The Journey Man , Cheeky Pint , Sourcery , Closing Bell , Halftime Report , On with Kara Swisher , The Compound and Friends , Hard Fork (NYT) , The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish) , The Logan Bartlett Show , WSJ's Take On the Week , The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost , WSJ Your Money Briefing , How I Built This (Guy Raz) , Decoder with Nilay Patel , Uncapped with Jack Altman , The Pomp Podcast , The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis , Crucible Moments , Big Technology , Thinking Crypto News & Interviews , StrictlyVC Download , The Milk Road Show , Masters of Scale and Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) .

Recently: “Tokenization, Agentic Trading, Harmonic: Robinhood's Mission to Expand Ownership with CEO Vlad Tenev” on No Priors (November 2026); “10AM Hour: Fed Decision Day, SK Hynix Surges, Robinhood CEO on Earnings 10/28/26” on Squawk on the Street (October 2026); “White House AI Accord, Model Welfare, Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry | Ali Golshan, Mike Intrator, Vlad Tenev, Pari Singh, Minna Song, Dev Ittycheria, Daragh Murphy, Noah Friedman” on TBPN (September 2026); “White House History: President Trump Rings the NYSE and Nasdaq Opening Bells 7/6/26” on Squawk on the Street (July 2026); “The New American Dream: Democratising Investing” on The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost (July 2026); “A Financial “Super App” & Met Gala Moments 5/5/26” on Squawk Pod (May 2026).

What They Said

“Over 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts with us in the few months since we've launched it. The tool calls have just been following this smooth exponential. The last number we announced was something like 30 million tool calls per day.” — Vlad Tenev, No Priors

Asked whether people will actually let AI agents trade for them, Tenev describes Robinhood's agent product, which began as an MCP server. He says agentic trading is one of two areas of agentic finance that already has product-market fit.

No Priors · 2026-11-05 Permalink → Listen →
No Priors Around 22:42 into the episode
Vlad Tenev

…them together in new ways. And I don't want to presuppose what developers come up with because I wouldn't have been able to tell you that stock token linked NFTs or stock token meme pairs would become a thing. Like I just had no way to foresee how quickly those things would grow and become real.

Sarah Guo

It's not necessarily ownership. What is your perspective on prediction markets?

Vlad Tenev

Yeah, I mean, I actually think prediction markets do tie into ownership because a lot of people have unique knowledge and ideas and they have hot takes on things that maybe not everyone knows. Like you might be an expert in AI model development. You know, we have lots of contracts that allow you to speculate and hedge on what AI model will be best this week or this month or this year. And the way to kind of like monetize that knowledge before prediction markets was highly indirect. Like maybe you could trade derivatives on, you know, Google stock or NVIDIA stock. Sounds imprecise, yeah. Yeah. And so there is an important thing with being able to monetize your own knowledge and doing it more directly. It's actually one of the reasons we announced and were planning to launch KPI contracts. So for a long time, if you wanted, like say you're studying, let's say you're studying a company and you have a pretty good idea that it's going to beat earnings, EPS or revenue. Well, in the past, if you bought the stock or you bought like an option on…

Sarah Guo

Do you think people will let agents trade for them and when? And what's the impact of that?

Vlad Tenev

Yeah. So we launched a product earlier this year, which is basically a Robinhood MCP. We call it Agentic Trading, Harmonic: we have Agentic Trading, Card as well. So in the broader realm of Agentic Finance, I think there's two things that have product market fit. One is Agentic Trading, Harmonic…

Sarah Guo

Amazing. What do you think the impact is of this on either participant mix or financial infrastructure? Just because many of these things that you describe, institutional traders have the ability to do this, but it's expensive and sophisticated, right? And so if that's democratized, what does that…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“If you have an AI lab that goes public at a trillion or 2 trillion, in order for an individual investor at IPO to make that type of return, they have to get into the quadrillions. It's crazy. The gains keep getting concentrated into a smaller and smaller group of venture capitalists or institutional investors.” — Vlad Tenev, No Priors

Asked what could fix the sense that the AI boom isn't broadly owned, Tenev contrasts today's trillion-dollar IPO talk with Microsoft and Amazon, which listed at valuations in the hundreds of millions. It's his case for opening private markets to retail investors.

No Priors · 2026-11-05 Permalink → Listen →
No Priors Around 33:11 into the episode
Vlad Tenev

…happens, which is have paper tickets and floor traders in a trading pit. So I don't think it's not clear to me that anything fundamental has to change with regulation. But as it gets bigger, which I don't doubt it will, we might run into special cases for which we need more regulatory clarity or

Sarah Guo

…I think it was not obvious that CI CD was going to completely fall over like in the face of orders of magnitude growth in code generation. Oh, yeah. And so that was my question, which is like, yes, of course, we've had HFT, but if like everybody is a high-frequency trader, that feels like new load.

Vlad Tenev

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of different layers in the stack, right? And we should expect our on-chain stack is slightly different that already has MCPs, but you have our on-chain tools, which a lot of it is, you know, I talked about Robinhood chain being the best chain for real world assets. Also, it's the best chain for AI agents. So we're seeing a lot of agentic trading there. On our CeFi, centralized offerings, you know, we have a lot of end-to-end control over the entire system, right? We have our databases. We have our code that the strategies are running on, the sandboxes. We build a lot of those tools. We have to optimize all of that. But, you know, once it gets through our system, you get to places like the algo, the market makers, which are all extremely sophisticated software shops. I mean, you're talking Citadel, Jane Street, Jump Trading. These are like low latency, high frequency folks. So I'm not so worried about them scaling to meet the demand. And then you have the exchanges, and the exchanges, because of pressure from HFTs and algo trading, have really optimized their APIs…

Sarah Guo

Given you're such a strong believer in ownership and then democratized ownership as important to societal stability and also like just opportunity for people, I think there's a sense that the AI revolution is not a broadly owned thing. Do you have an idea of what the solutions here might be? And…

Vlad Tenev

Yeah. And I think we identified this problem last year. It's a couple of things, right? First, all of the major innovative AI companies are private. I mean, with some exceptions. You can look at NVIDIA and Google. But yeah, but those companies were already quite big before they really got into this…

Sarah Guo

That was my question for you, which is, you know, if you are, for example, a venture capitalist with a portfolio you think is going to make money in privates, then some people will have a choice of LPs. There's institutions. There's your friends you can make money for. Obviously, there are rules…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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