Keith Gill (aka “Roaring Kitty”) returned to social media this summer. Three years earlier, the Reddit influencer had helped sparked a meme stocks craze among retail investors that led to the GameStop stock short squeeze. The surge in stock price was a disaster for online brokerage platform Robinhood: The company halted the trading of GameStop and other stocks in January 2021 for a day and then only let consumers close out trades on the stock, barring them from placing new ones. Robinhood and its cofounder and CEO, Vlad Tenev, faced accusations of market manipulation by angry retail investors. Roaring Kitty, meanwhile, went quiet and stopped posting.
Now he’s back, and he’s taken a huge stake in GameStop once again. But Tenev isn’t worried. The company, he says, is in a different place. For one, it’s now publicly traded. After its July 2021 IPO, it’s seen steady growth. In 2023, it hit a record $1.9 billion in revenue, up 37% from 2023, and total net revenues increased 40% year-over-year in Q2 2024.
Tenev has been on a mission to build the company into, what he calls a “trusted, important financial institution,” and leave behind its meme stock associations. To do this, the platform has expanded its offerings to appeal to an audience beyond day traders, launching financial tools like credit cards and retirement accounts. And Tenev is now focused as much on crypto regulation as he is retail investing.
Tenev recently stopped by Most Innovative Companies to talk about investing in AI, the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, and why he thinks crypto is the next frontier for the financial industry. We started by asking him about Roaring Kitty’s return.
Back in 2021, there was a meme stocks frenzy. Companies like GameStop and AMC saw their shares skyrocket, retail investors piled in. Earlier this year, there was a resurgence of meme stocks, and Roaring Kitty returned to YouTube. Did you get flashbacks?
For us it was an opportunity to show that we’re a different company than back in 2021. We were a private company then. This time around, I saw an opportunity to show how far Robinhood had come as a business [in terms of] making investments in the infrastructure, and having a strong balance sheet.
Robinhood has faced criticism that the app’s design incentivizes compulsive trading. Are you ever worried about feeding retail investors’ addictions?
