Vladimir Tenev is a Bulgarian immigrant who founded one of the most popular budget stock trading platforms within the US marketplace, Robinhood. After being brought to America for a better life, he began his quest to fortune by creating a handful of failed startups including Chronos Research. From this failure, he tried coming up with other ideas but none of them ever came into fruition. During this time he turned to stocks as a source of income and entertainment. At that time, the stock market was full of hidden fees and lots and lots of royalty. He hated that and wondered if there really was a way that he could eliminate all those fees. Soon, he created the idea of a royalty-free stock trading application, Robinhood. He promoted online just to see what the reaction was and if there was really that much interest in it. Within the first day, thousands were interested and over one million showed interest within the first year. Tenev had no prior experience to build a platform of this magnitude. So, he did some research and found what the people wanted and brought the right developers, legal team, and stock market specialists together to make it a reality. To date, the company is valued at over $7 billion and it is still growing. It has quickly become the top stock trading platform for penny stocks, which helps with its royalty free trading strategy. Robinhood has quickly grown and become a prime example of a person, with no experience in the field he is entering, bringing the right tools together for the right people to create a multi-billion dollar company.
Unfortunately, Robinhood’s blatent and public illegal actions by restricting trading during the great GameStop stock short squeeze in January of 2021 has caused it to rightfully lose a large portion of it’s users. Robinhood was at one point the go-to investing app for new investors, but this situation has greatly changed that initial view, as Robinhood’s model has shown to be extremely successful and has been mimicked by many other companies.
Robinhood is a great platform that makes trading easy for first time users. I use Robinhood for all of my investing needs because it doesn’t have royalties and is generally easy to use. They provide you with all of the tools you need to succeed as an investor. It is amazing to have a service where you can make as many trades as you want without a brokerage fee. He is incredibly innovative especially for someone with as little experience as he has.