Vlad Tenev
Vladimir Tenev is an American entrepreneur who is most notably the co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Robinhood, a US-based financial technology services company.
Tenev moved to the United States from his native Bulgaria at the age of five. After studying mathematics at Stanford and UCLA and getting a master's degree, he decided to partner with Baiju Bhatt to create several fintech startups. One of them, Robinhood, became a publicly-traded multibillion-dollar company.
Early life and education
Tenev was born in Varna, Bulgaria. When he was a toddler, his parents migrated to the U.S. leaving him with his grandparents before he joined them when he was five. His parents both worked for the World Bank. He attended Thomas [Jefferson High School for Science and Technology] in Fairfax County, Virginia, to which he later donated $125,000.He earned a bachelor's of science degree in mathematics from Stanford University, where he met Baiju Bhatt. He was a member of a fraternity at Stanford. In 2008, he earned a master's degree in mathematics from the University of California in Los Angeles, and originally intended to study for a PhD in mathematics at UCLA and pursue a career in academia. He instead dropped out to work with Bhatt.
Career
Early career
In 2010, Tenev and Baiju Bhatt started a high-frequency trading software company called Celeris, based in New York. By January 2011 they abandoned it to create Chronos Research, which sold low-latency software to other trading firms and banks. Later in 2011, they moved to California.Robinhood
In 2013, Tenev and Bhatt co-founded the trading platform Robinhood. In 2015, Robinhood launched its mobile app to the public. Following a funding round in May 2018 which increased Robinhood's valuation to $6 billion, Tenev and Bhatt became billionaires.In November 2020, Tenev became the sole CEO of Robinhood, having previously shared the co-CEO title with Bhatt. The next year, Robinhood debuted on the stock market. The initial public offering for the company placed it at a $32 billion valuation.
GameStop short squeeze
During the January 2021 GameStop and AMC Entertainment short squeezes, Robinhood restricted users from buying certain stocks and options, citing an inability to meet federal clearinghouse deposit requirements. Tenev publicly defended the decision, which drew backlash from users and politicians who accused the company of protecting institutional investors. On February 18, 2021, Tenev testified before the United States [House Committee on Financial Services], apologized for the trading halt, and maintained that he had done nothing wrong.Sebastian Stan portrayed Tenev in the 2023 film Dumb Money, a drama about the GameStop short squeeze.