Vlad Tenev

As Occupy Wall Street filled lower Manhattan in 2011, Vlad Tenev asked himself whether the low-latency trading systems he sold to banks and hedge funds were work he would be proud of decades later. His answer was no, and within two years he and Baiju Bhatt had incorporated a brokerage built to charge nothing per trade.¹

Tenev is the co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, a mobile brokerage that lets ordinary people trade stocks, options, and cryptocurrency without paying a commission per trade. Before Robinhood, a traditional broker typically charged several dollars per trade regardless of order size. Robinhood removed that fee entirely, and within a few years every major US brokerage had followed.

Background

Tenev was born on February 13, 1987, in Varna, Bulgaria. The communist government collapsed in November 1989, and his family left the country not long after with almost nothing. His father, an economics professor, was admitted to a master's program at the University of Delaware and moved to the US alone first; his mother and then Tenev followed within about a year and a half. Both parents later worked at the World Bank.

Placed into an English-only kindergarten while speaking only Bulgarian, Tenev learned the language within about six months through full immersion. He taught himself programming in his father's university computer lab and attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a selective public magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia. He studied mathematics with a physics minor at Stanford, where he met Baiju Bhatt, a fellow only child of immigrant academics, at a summer physics program. Tenev earned a master's in mathematics from Stanford in 2008 and enrolled at UCLA to pursue a PhD under Terence Tao, intending to become a research mathematician.¹

Getting started

Tenev left the UCLA program after one year, in 2008, as the Lehman Brothers collapse unfolded. Bhatt convinced him building trading software would be a compelling alternative to graduate school. Their first venture, Celeris, built high-frequency trading software and grew to a few million dollars in revenue before they judged it not meaningful enough. In 2011 they founded Chronos Research to sell low-latency trading infrastructure to banks and hedge funds.

Building that infrastructure taught Tenev what it actually cost institutions to execute a trade: effectively nothing. A small engineering team could run systems moving billions of dollars in daily volume, yet retail brokers charged customers up to ten dollars per trade.¹ Tenev has said Occupy Wall Street sharpened the question of whether this work was something he would be proud of decades later; his answer for Chronos was no. He and Bhatt concluded the commission was a legacy markup with no technical justification, and set out to eliminate it.

What he built

Tenev and Bhatt incorporated Robinhood in April 2013 on two founding rules: no trading commissions and no minimum account balance. The app opened to the public in 2015 after a waitlist of roughly a million signups, borrowing a software-as-a-service playbook rather than traditional brokerage economics: acquire customers first, monetize later through payment for order flow, interest on customer cash, and additional products.

Growth accelerated sharply from late 2019 through 2020 as new investors joined during the pandemic. In January 2021, Robinhood drew congressional scrutiny after restricting trading in GameStop and other stocks caught up in a short-squeeze frenzy, citing a spike in clearinghouse deposit requirements. Tenev testified before the House Financial Services Committee that February, defended the restriction as an operational necessity, and apologized to customers.¹ Robinhood went public on Nasdaq in July 2021 at a valuation of roughly 32 billion dollars, giving retail investors an unusually large IPO share through IPO Access.

By the mid-2020s Robinhood had diversified well beyond stock trading, with Tenev citing nine business lines each generating over 100 million dollars in annual revenue, including equity brokerage, options and futures, crypto trading, banking, a credit card, a Robinhood Gold subscription, and the acquired TradePMR and Bitstamp platforms.² Robinhood also built the consumer app for the government's Invest America accounts program, which seeds investment accounts for American children, reaching the third spot on the US App Store at its June 2026 launch. Its stock price and market cap rose substantially through 2025 and 2026 alongside the broader crypto rally. Tenev also co-founded and chairs Harmonic, an AI research lab, without operating it day to day.

How he operates

Tenev frames the founding move, eliminating commissions, as an example of a broader pattern: finding a fee legacy players charge for a service that costs them almost nothing to provide, and removing it. He applies the same logic to IPO Access, which gives retail investors allocations in offerings previously reserved for institutions, and to tokenization, which puts shares of companies such as OpenAI and SpaceX on a blockchain so they trade outside normal market hours. Tenev says he expects tokenization to eventually extend to real estate, art, and most private-company equity, and has called it "the biggest innovation in capital markets since the central limit order book."³

He says the obstacle is not technology or regulation but company consent: many private companies resist continuous real-time trading of their shares, and he believes Robinhood's task is to work with companies until they see the benefit rather than force the change. He points to IPO Access as a template: issuers were skeptical in 2021, but by the mid-2020s most major IPOs were proactively asking about retail allocation.³ That pattern, locating value an institutional actor extracts and routing it to individual customers instead, recurs across everything he has built. Tenev describes his motivation as building things that become the standard, saying he was "never really doing it for the money," and says he prefers full integration of work and personal life over a strict separation between the two.²

Where things stand

As of the mid-2020s, Tenev remains co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, now a multi-line financial platform spanning brokerage, derivatives, crypto, and banking. He also serves as executive chairman of Harmonic without operating it directly. Robinhood continues pursuing retail access to private markets through tokenization, a fund-based vehicle called Robinhood Ventures, and IPO Access.

Key facts

• Fled Bulgaria as a young child after the 1989 collapse of its communist government; learned English in about six months in an English-only kindergarten.
• Left a UCLA math PhD program under Terence Tao after one year, in 2008, to build trading software with Stanford classmate Baiju Bhatt.
• Robinhood, founded April 2013 on no commissions and no minimum balance, drew roughly a million waitlist signups before its 2015 launch and pushed the US brokerage industry to eliminate commissions within a few years.
• Testified before the House Financial Services Committee in February 2021 over Robinhood's restriction of GameStop trading.
• Robinhood went public in July 2021 at roughly a 32 billion dollar valuation and by the mid-2020s ran nine business lines each over 100 million dollars in annual revenue.
• Separately serves as executive chairman and co-founder of Harmonic, an AI mathematics lab, alongside his role as Robinhood's CEO.