Liberty Mutual Co-host (2:00)
I think companies are waking up to this. You know, we, we were relatively early to embrace the retail trader because the retail trader is our customer. So of course we're, we have a natural incentive as a company to have our customers be shareholders. Right. Because not not only are they are our shareholders, but they're people that use the product every day. You know, our product is a stock market investing product at its core. And one of the things that I'm very proud of is the work that we've done on IPO Access. I mentioned you guys a little earlier is my second trip to New York this week. First time I was at the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday at a roundtable called Make IPOs Great Again, funny name. They had the red hats too, which, which by the way, the idea that, you know, the administration and the regulators are coming to, to Robinhood as a representative of, of the retail investor to, to collect feedback for how to make capital markets and IPOs better was something that probably I wouldn't have imagined the first time we met in 2022. So pretty crazy how quickly things can change. But when we went public in 21, we rolled out this product called IPO Access. And the idea was not just have IPOs be for the chosen few, the elites, the high net worth, the private wealth folks, and obviously the institutions, but how do we plug Robinhood investors directly into IPOs and get them allocations at the same price on a level playing field with the institutions. And so our IPO at the time was I think the largest IPO retail allocation for an IPO of its size. And we tried to get other companies on board, we got some, but they were very skeptical and reluctant. You know, some people actually to be fair, really bought into it. But most companies, we had to ask for favors and you know, they would throw us a few scraps like we'll give you half a percent of the IPO allocation. So we really asked for favors and people didn't really get it. They're like, what's the point? I'm just trying to take my company public, go through the process, get it over with so I can get back to running my business. They didn't really see the point. And Fast forward to 2025 this year when the IPOs have come back. Every company of consequence has basically come to us and asked, let's talk about our retail strategy. How do we get retail more engaged? And you've started to see the CEOs of those companies when they're doing their press about the ipo, talking about how retail's big constituency and saying, you know, in the case of, of bullish CEO, we give retail 20% allocation is one of the largest retail allocations ever. Gemini CEO, the Winklevoss wins, gave a huge retail allocation and you know, now it's completely shifted where retail is definitely being a first class citizen. So what we're trying to do is push that forward, go deeper into IPOs and continue the, the leadership we have there post IPO, we want to make the brand of being a public company a little bit better. I don't know if, if you guys have, I'm sure you talk to a lot of entre entrepreneurs, some of whom are public. Generally the perception and the way they talk about being public is negative. We have to be public. But I hate earnings calls. I hate this, I hate that it's a choreograph and what I'm trying to do is shift it into being a positive thing. So rather than thinking of your earnings calls as a chore, how can they become fun? Can you as the executive be, have fun during earnings and also can the audience actually enjoy watching it? So we've been investing a lot in actually making our earnings calls. Not just informative but, but entertaining. So for the last one we did it at the Chase center, home of the, the Warriors, State warriors. And we not only had the sell side analyst who's the typical earnings audience, but we had buy side investors. We also had the media. So the media was, was at our earnings calls and everyone could ask questions on a level playing field. We had retail investors via Zoom asking questions. And then of course the whole thing was, was, was televised. So it was on live stream on social media. And you know, go back a year ago, our earnings calls were on a Polycom audio only. We had maybe like hundreds of people listening and now it's, it's gone to tens of thousands so orders of magnitude increase in the audience for earnings. And now we're starting to actually export this as a product to other public companies. So Opendoor for example, they saw what we were doing, they said we want to engage retail, we want retail to be our number one constituency. So we work with them to live stream their earnings to our audience in the Robin Hood app. And we've heard from many people that you know, they'd like to start doing this. So I think you'll see earnings calls becoming fun and I think the brand of being a public company start to shift into a more positive thing. And also on the other side of the spectrum, before a company is going to public, when they're still private or hard at work trying to get retail exposure on the private side and making that a little bit easier, we have a great initiative called Robinhood Ventures which is going to be in the US and we're launching a closed end fund that's on file with the SEC right now. So we're actually in the quiet period. I can't talk much about it but, but the idea is make it so that retail investors can invest in the best private companies before they go public. So we're kind of tackling it across every part of the spectrum.
