Vlad Tenev is the co-founder and co-CEO of the no-free stock trading app, Robinhood. Tenev received his BS in math at Stanford. While he was at Stanford, his met his future co-founder Baiju Bhatt.  They first started a company called, Chronos Research. This company provided technology for hedge funds and banks to create automated trades. They realized that the hedge funds and banks were using their software to make trades essentially for free. This was the moment when they got the idea for Robinhood.

Robinhood was an immediate success. Once they released their initial website, they had 600 people sign up overnight. Robinhood got featured on Hacker News, which propelled them to receiving over 100,000 signups in a month. After a year a million people signed up. These people signed up when Tenev did not even have a viable app yet. The time between the initial release of the website, and the app release date was one and a half years. Tenev found a way to get over a million people to sign up for his app without creating the it.

Tenev and Bhatt had trouble finding capital to start their business. They were denied by 75 venture capitalists. Although it was a struggle, they eventually secured to proper seed capital. Robinhood now has over 2 million users, and is estimated to be worth 1.3 billion dollars.