- Company
- Robinhood
- Role
- Co-Founder & CEO
- Est. Net Worth
- $1 Billion
- Stage
- Elite
- Industry
- Finance
Vlad Tenev
Co-Founder & CEO at Robinhood
About
Vlad Tenev co-founded Robinhood in 2013 to make investing more accessible through commission-free, mobile-first trading. He has led the company as CEO through rapid growth, a 2021 IPO, and an expansion into crypto, retirement, and banking products.
Current Company
Robinhood — Co-Founder & CEO
Democratizing Finance, One Trade at a Time
Vlad Tenev co-founded Robinhood in 2013 with Baiju Bhatt, building a mobile-first brokerage that eliminated trading commissions and made investing accessible to millions of first-time investors. Born in Bulgaria and raised in the United States, Vlad Tenev studied mathematics and physics at Stanford before dropping out of a PhD program at UCLA to pursue fintech. The insight behind Robinhood was that the brokerage industry was charging commissions for something that should be free — and that a better mobile experience could attract a new generation of investors.
Under Vlad Tenev’s leadership as CEO, Robinhood grew explosively, attracting over 20 million users and going public in 2021. Robinhood’s commission-free model was so successful that every major brokerage — including Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, and Fidelity — was eventually forced to eliminate trading commissions as well. Vlad Tenev’s impact on the brokerage industry is a textbook example of disruption: an incumbent cost structure destroyed by a startup that rethought the business model from scratch.