Robinhood CFO discusses what’s next in IPO access

00:00 Speaker A

Robin who gave access or what was pre IPO access for SpaceX. How do you, how do you assess the stock slide since IPO. And what do you say to those retail investors that now, I mean they’ve gotten burned by whatever, I mean the stock’s down what, 40, 50% or whatever it is?

00:19 Speaker B

Yeah, it’s it’s a good question. So we don’t comment on any particular stocks. So, in general, you know, we stand for access. Um, stocks can go up, stocks can go down. It didn’t seem right to us that one of the most historic IPOs in history, retail would be left out. So we were really excited to be able to support it. We had nearly a million customers that put in orders. Um, and we’ll see what happens in the long term. Our customers as I mentioned, are long-term bullish and so many of them are probably still buying it right now. Um, and so we’re going to continue to support him.

00:53 Speaker A

Yeah, but this is what I ask you, so you will you will still support, you will still do what you did for SpaceX for other IPOs? Even though, look, a year after a lot of IPOs come public, they all, I mean, a lot of them just don’t do well.

01:05 Speaker B

Yeah, it’s um it’s a bad it’s a mix. Like some go up and some go down. We don’t want to be paternalistic. Like we’re not going to say you can’t access this. I think that’s even worse. Customers should do their own research. We think it’s important. These are riskier assets. But for us, if you give customers access, you give them the education, they’re adults, they should be able to make a decision. So we’re going to continue to support a lot of the uh the upcoming IPOs. We actually just got our license to be an underwriter now. So we actually want to go even deeper and helping both companies

01:31 Speaker A

When was that?

01:32 Speaker B

Uh we announced this a few months ago. And uh we haven’t underwritten an IPO yet, but we have our license. We’re Finra approved and so you should expect in the near term you may actually see Robinhood underwriting IPOs.

01:46 Speaker A

So that means you mean you’re going toe-to-toe, going back to the bank question, you’re going toe-to-toe with Mike, with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs?

01:54 Speaker B

We will we will be up there. And right now we are building it out. It’s nascent and I think we have said later this year we’ll be ready to do it. But this is one of our long-term bets. Like we want to be able to serve companies from inception. Uh we have our Ventures fund business where we can invest in new companies. We can then do your growth rounds with Robin Adventures fund one. We can help take you public and then after you go public, we can support you as well. So that’s the vision.