Vlad Tenev
Chief executive of Robinhood, the retail brokerage that pushed zero-commission trading into the mainstream and now offers prediction markets and tokenized share...
“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.”
No Priors · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026
Context
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.
Transcript
…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
…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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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