Vlad Tenev

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups · Tokenization, Agentic Trading, Harmonic: Robinhood's Mission to…

• What Is Robinhood Ventures?

  Vlad Tenev says Robinhood Ventures is how individual investors can own private companies, including at the seed and Series A stage. He says he cannot persuade companies to go public earlier, even though Robinhood underwrites IPOs. The aim is that a startup cap table without retail investors becomes an anomaly.

  Fund One is the structure he describes. Robinhood customers put capital in through an IPO on what he calls the largest retail channel for IPOs. That money is invested in startups, and the fund trades on the New York Stock Exchange like a stock. He says Fund One holds late-stage private companies, including OpenAI and Eleven Labs, along with other fintech and AI companies.

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• What Is Agentic Trading at Robinhood?

  Vlad Tenev describes agentic trading as an agent that executes trades and runs a strategy for the customer. Robinhood launched it earlier this year as an MCP, alongside an agentic credit card. He says agentic trading is one of two agentic-finance products that have found product-market fit.

  He states the adoption as over 150,000 customers who opened agentic trading accounts in the few months since launch, and something like 30 million tool calls a day at the last figure Robinhood announced. A couple of weeks before this conversation, at Hood Summit, Robinhood announced Robinhood agents. The harness and the screen sit inside a Robinhood account. He compares that to Claude Code or Codex, buil

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• What Is a Prediction Market?

  Vlad Tenev treats a prediction market as a direct way to trade what you know, and as a new kind of news. Someone with a view on which AI model will be best this week, this month, or this year can only express that indirectly by trading a related stock. A prediction market lets them monetize the belief itself.

  Robinhood plans to launch KPI contracts for that. A person who has studied a company can trade the earnings number, the revenue print, or another company KPI, instead of the stock. The stock can fall for an unrelated reason, including guidance.

  He calls prediction markets an evolution of news. He does not think the future front page is the New York Times. He pictures sections for busi

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• Why Does Vlad Tenev Say to Grow Thick Skin?

  Vlad Tenev says leaders should grow thick skin. Struggle and endurance still matter, and he tries to create that environment even though he has not fully figured it out.

  A good part of the difference, he says, is nature versus nurture. He may simply have been born that way, and he does not know how much of it comes from the environment. The hopeful view for other leaders is that a challenge now makes a person more level later. He credits Bezos with saying the way through these challenges is to grow thick skin.

  You can control that about yourself, and you cannot control the outside world. Growing thick skin, as he puts it, is a superpower that not everyone is capable of.

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• How Does Tokenization Work Like a Stablecoin?

  Tokenization works almost like a stablecoin, Vlad Tenev says. It is a new innovation. A stablecoin takes dollars or treasuries, puts them in a wrapper, puts them in a box, and mints and burns tokens against the box.

  The traditional assets stay custodied at a traditional institution like a bank. The tokens can then trade freely on DeFi. They can move anywhere around the world, trade in fractional amounts, and be swapped in different protocols or lending pools. Free trading of the tokens, while the dollars or treasuries stay at the bank, opens up a ton of possibilities.

  The same concept can extend to any real world asset.

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• Why Did Vlad Tenev Co-found Harmonic?

  Vlad Tenev co-founded Harmonic a couple of years ago to build mathematical superintelligence. Last year Harmonic created Aristotle, one of three models that got a gold medal on the International Math Olympiad.

  Harmonic then rolled Aristotle out to the public. People used Aristotle to tackle unsolved math problems, including Erdos problems, and other mathematicians used it for new results. The tools he builds, at Harmonic and at Robinhood, need to empower individuals.

  The latest wave of AI models solving math problems is too centralized. AI companies run big data centers where employees use secret models to do the work. The approach that would ultimately win puts the tools in people's hands

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• Why Did Vlad Tenev Race Through Math?

  Vlad Tenev raced through math because his family said a scholarship was how he could go to college, and their right to stay in the country was not secure. Growing up around the University of Maryland, teachers met his parents and said he was really good at math, and the community pushed kids with potential to skip grades and do more math. His parents sat him down and said the family's finances were very insecure, they were not making any money, and he would have to do very well in school to get a scholarship. They were visa holders, and if they lost their jobs they would be sent back to Bulgaria.

  He turned the pressure into a competition with himself and with his parents, who were also stro

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• When Did Vlad Tenev Come to America?

  Vlad Tenev immigrated to America in the 1990s after his parents. He was born in Eastern Europe in the late 80s, on the brink of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lifting of the Iron Curtain, and his last year in Bulgaria was 1991, when inflation was something like 170 percent.

  His dad went first, for a master's at the University of Delaware, and stayed in America full time. His mom came about a year later, and he came about six months after her. As a small child he did not see his dad for a year and a half or his mom for six months. He lived with his grandparents because the family did not have the money to send everyone, and they were not sure his dad would have a long-term future i

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• Why Does Robinhood Call Itself the Ownership Company?

  Vlad Tenev calls Robinhood the ownership company because owning assets is the tried and true route to financial freedom and the best way to build wealth. Robinhood is live in some form in over 120 countries. On an individual level, trading, accumulating assets, and investing in venture all sit inside ownership, and what people own becomes part of their identity, from a car collection to collectibles, cards, and a stock portfolio.

  A society without broad ownership is inherently very unstable and fragile. When more people own things, they are more bought in, they have more stake in the outcome, and they become defenders and protectors of the system. With people pushing back against society, a

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