Great day for the @ElevenLabs team. Great to have them as part of Robinhood Ventures Fund I!

Was lucky to have @sahillp run my new hire onboarding at RH back in the day. His brilliance and ability to distill complexity into the most important thing was always clear. Congrats to Sahill, @vineetgoel92 and the team! They will do great things for customers with @stripe

A peek into the future

I hear that place is pretty great 🙂 go @databricks and Go Bears!!

Excited to announce RVI's investment in @CrusoeAI. Trusted by many of the industry's largest customers, Crusoe creates value across the AI stack from energy to data centers to cloud. We believe it is one of the most differentiated companies at the center of the AI buildout.

When I joined RH in 2019, I came from finance with no clue what product mgmt was. Our coffee-buddies Slackbot paired me with @joshelman and blew my mind. Getting to build consumer product at RH was an amazing experience. Excited for lucky founders who’ll get to work with Josh!

👨🏽‍🍳👨🏽‍🍳👨🏽‍🍳

The simulation is alive and well (2013, The Infinity Machine)

Private markets are built on trust. At Robinhood Ventures, we believe access starts with respecting the companies creating real value. That's why all of our investments to date were directly on the cap table, with issuer approval. That is the kind of access Robinhood Ventures believes in.

Incredible piece by @domcooke . One of the best things I've read (and re read) all year. joincolossus.com/article/hen…

Personal aside - this was a year that started as by far my worst, and slowly - then quickly - flipped to easily my best. So grateful for those in my life who were a part of it, and everything I learned about the world and myself. What a life, happy Thanksgiving y’all! 🧡

All roads lead back to power

agreed, turns out interest rates have a really big impact on hiring! the interesting counterfactual I wonder often though - what if ChatGPT had been released in a 0% rates world?

Yet to see compelling evidence that enterprises' 'AI-driven' headcount reduction is actually attributable to AI and not just a continued unwinding of indiscriminate ZIRP growth

VCs: Don’t do anything funky to juice your ARR growth. Also VCs: I won’t meet with you unless you’ve hit a certain growth rate. Incentives shape behavior.

Diwali from Jaipur this year 🪔 🇮🇳

Since the financial crisis, we’ve had very few new banks. -Dodd-Frank made it more expensive to start one. -Scale became critical in a way that shut out small entrants: fixed costs of compliance, regulatory reporting, cybersecurity, core IT systems, AML monitoring all increased -low-interest-rate environment made banking margins unattractive -Most fintechs actually benefited from not being banks, because of Durbin (scaled banks make less per card swipe than smaller banks that fintechs partner with) -most importantly, the OCC simply wasn’t granting very many new charters Now the landscape is shifting -Regulators are signaling a friendlier posture, with the OCC and FDIC saying they want more de novos. -Congress is pushing too (Promoting New Bank Formation Act) -Rise of stables means we'll need regulated, trustworthy banks to custody reserves and provide payment access -Fintechs that avoided charters are now seeking them for a variety of reasons - some to get direct access to payment rails, some just because working with partner banks was so difficult... every marketing message has to get approved through some convoluted system and each new ad takes weeks to get approved. The combination is finally reopening the door to new bank formation... we're going to see a lot of new banks in the coming years, the door is open.