Robinhood Launches IPO, CEO Vlad Tenev Responds

Robinhood is now officially trading on the NYSE. At the initial price of $38 per share (a 32 billion dollar valuation), Robinhood hopes to ride the wave of recent IPOs and gain even more leverage in the trading circles. Listen below as CEO and President Vlad Tenev break down the trading app’s hopes and expectations for their new IPO.

Tenev: It’s really humbling that six short years after we launched our product to the public, we have over 22 million customers and we’re on this journey with our customers and allowing them to participate in the offering.

Host: And speaking of your customers, you said you’d allocate 20% to 35% for Robinhood’s own users, we’re hearing that somewhere in the range of 20 to 25 percent, still one of the biggest allocations ever. How did you get to that number? And are you concerned at all about volatility?

Tenev: Well, we certainly are proud to have one of the largest retail allocations ever, and the way that we think about it is it’s a long term focus company and we’re making decisions and making big bets with the long term interest of the business in mind. So volatility comes and goes. And we’re not going to be commenting too much on daily fluctuations of the stock price.

Host: The retail movement, though, is a phenomenon, the meme stock movement, a phenomenon, and looking at social media just this morning, there are strong feelings out there about what Robinhood represents. When you think about Gamestop, when you think about AMC, do you get at all worried about Robinhood becoming a target of its own users?

Tevev: Yeah, we’re not really thinking again about anything that happens in the market, especially in the short term, the goal is to keep making great products, to keep improving the service and keep growing with our customers. And I think we’ve seen certainly finance become more important and the retail investor become much more important within investing. And that’s something we think will continue.

Host: You live streamed your roadshow to the public, you said that more products are coming, maybe even retirement accounts like iras, when should investors expect those kind of things?

Tenev: Well, one of the things that we’ve been really excited about is turning first time investors into long term investors. You can see that with some of the recent products that we’ve launched. It started with fractional shares, but then we built on top of that foundation with things like recurring investments, where if you’re a customer, you can put in an order to buy a particular stock or ETF on a regular basis. And we’re going to continue investing in that. We’re seeing really, really good adoption and we’d like to see a large portion of our activity be kind of long term investing in the future.

*Bloomberg contributed to this content

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