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Vlad and his impalers

Hello and welcome to Protocol | Fintech. This Friday, Robinhood's CEO says sorry, Stripe and Coinbase valuations are soaring, and why Gusto's CEO wants to set unpaid wages free.
Also, join the Protocol | Fintech team for a Clubhouse chat on fintech in the GameStop era on Feb. 24 at 2 p.m. PST. We'll be joined by Sheel Mohnot, lead seed fintech investor at Better Tomorrow Ventures. It's going to be fun!
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A humbled and apologetic Vlad Tenev dialed into the Capitol yesterday for a grilling on Robinhood's controversial response to the GameStop stock revolt.
But the CEO did little to assure experts and analysts who watched the hearing that the GameStop stock trading fiasco won't happen again, or that the Robinhood platform doesn't expose amateur investors to enormous risks, or that Tenev even really knows what he's doing.
Tenev took some hits during the hearing itself. In particular, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried to debunk Robinhood's claim that trading on the platform is free.
The hearings highlighted how equities trading is complex and confusing, and increasingly risky in an era of social media and mobile technology.
Tenev reflected on the death of Alex Kearns, who committed suicide after mistakenly believing he had racked up huge losses on his Robinhood account, during the hearing. And apologized yet again.
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What fintech trend are you excited about or you would like to see?
I would like to think there's a trend around access to unpaid wages becoming free. And I really hope it becomes something everyone does. There could be profound impacts to real pain points for a lot of people to get caught up in overdraft debt, to get caught up in credit card debt, to get caught up on their payday loan debt. And it's not necessary if you could access unpaid wages for free. It's a trend that I believe in and hope to catalyze further.
Which fintech trend worries you?
I think there is a broader pitfall in [the] Silicon Valley ethos around "do things quickly and it'll all work out in the end." I worry sometimes, especially when you apply it to things like healthcare or fintech. This is really really important stuff that has to be done right. This is people's money. It's not our money. I think there's a potential trend around building out an abstraction layer [or] creating an API. The fear I would have is making mistakes and it's going to be people's livelihood, someone's savings getting wiped out or someone's debt profile getting destroyed. So how do we navigate this change but keep staying grounded to the responsibility we have to the customer, to be good, positive, trusted stewards of their money, their data?
What was your biggest blunder and what did you learn from it?
In 2008, I started my first company. It was me and a friend. And we saw that the Facebook platform had launched and we wanted to build tools on Facebook for small businesses. It was both an incredible learning experience and a blunder, to use your term. We didn't start really with the problem. We just started with wanting to build stuff, and wanting to have a company. [We] were in stealth for a long time. We didn't have a purpose, which is what I would say in retrospect. The biggest learning from that is what drove Gusto. With Gusto, it started with: What is the problem, what is the customer pain, what is the thing we want to fix in the world that is so broken, that is causing real frustration for lots of people? A lot of that learning is what drove the approach which we've taken with Gusto, and which I hope to keep spending decades of my life doing.
The future is positively digital. Ready? Consumers, investors and shareholders are savvier than ever. Everyone needs to create more engaging experiences that keep pace with today's new expectations. See how you can stay ahead with next-gen technologies that deliver on what matters most. We can help.
Thanks for reading. We'll be back with Protocol | Fintech on Tuesday.
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