The Information's TITV
00:10:05 · Akash Pasricha, Shiv Verma, Umesh Padval
[00:10:05] S0: Do do you think... Will will you open it up to, like, you know, external agent, Muse, Instinct, all these other apps? Is that coming? [00:10:14] S1: Oh, yeah. That already exists. If [00:10:15] S0: you Muse. Okay. [00:10:16] S1: If you go to the Grockbox store, you can actually find a Robinhood connector. We are working with Muse to have other connector up in the very, very near term, but absolutely. For us, we believe you should just give customers a choice. We should be available on every single platform, every type of connector. You should also be able to do it in app. It's similar to the Amazon model, selection wins. And so for us, if we give customers a great choice and let them trade, we think it's great for everybody. [00:10:39] S0: So let me ask you about the business model for you then, because we've written about this topic at The Information. I mean, agentic trading is interesting because in a world where you are making at least some money off the spread between the prices that people are buying and selling at, I imagine that agents... And we've seen it with algorithmic trading as well, agents might be better at that. So the spread, the opportunity to make money off that for you guys might be less. How do you see that affecting your financial results then? [00:11:16] S1: Yeah, it's a great question. The way we think about it is if volume goes up and spreads tighten, that's fine. We want to win market share. [00:11:24] S0: Price type of quantity, [00:11:25] S2: got you.
00:11:25 · Umesh Padval, Shiv Verma, Akash Pasricha
[00:11:25] S2: got you. [00:11:25] S1: Exactly. You give customers a great experience, and the agents are trading more, and they have awesome execution, that's fantastic. And if it brings spreads tighter, so be it. We will never ever try to do something to change that. And so we've done this over and over and over again. I mean, before Robinhood came here, commissions were $10 Now, as I mentioned, it's it's 1.2¢ per $100 trader on the rebate. If that goes lower, but the overall pie is bigger and customers are getting a fantastic experience, we call that a win win. [00:11:55] S0: Okay. And last question for you, Shiv. So you you said 14 businesses over a $100,000,000. What's gonna be the fifteenth? [00:12:02] S1: Oh, a couple competitors. We actually have an internal debate for what it's gonna be. So we have some of our futures business that's scaling nicely. Index Options is scaling really nicely. Robinhood Ventures, one that's near and dear to my heart, that's starting to scale nicely. The Robinhood chain, as I mentioned, it did 50,000,000 of gross, about 25,000,000 of net. It's early, so we didn't call it a cylinder yet. So if I come back on in a quarter or two, I'm hoping that we might have another cylinder for you.
00:12:02 · Shiv Verma, Akash Pasricha
[00:12:02] S1: Oh, a couple competitors. We actually have an internal debate for what it's gonna be. So we have some of our futures business that's scaling nicely. Index Options is scaling really nicely. Robinhood Ventures, one that's near and dear to my heart, that's starting to scale nicely. The Robinhood chain, as I mentioned, it did 50,000,000 of gross, about 25,000,000 of net. It's early, so we didn't call it a cylinder yet. So if I come back on in a quarter or two, I'm hoping that we might have another cylinder for you. [00:12:28] S0: Great. Okay. Well, Shiv, thanks for coming on. That is Shiv Verma, the CFO of Robinhood here on TITV. TPUs are taking center stage for Google right now. The Information has exclusive reporting that OpenAI, a Longtime Nvidia customer, is planning to buy Google's rival TPU chips. That scoop came the same day that Oracle said that it will also make TPUs available to its cloud customers. For more analysis, I want to bring on Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures, and Ben Pouladian, Founder and CEO of BEP Research. Gentlemen, welcome to you both. It is great to have you both back. Ben, I want to start with you. So why are Oracle and OpenAI turning to TPUs right now?
00:12:28 · Akash Pasricha, Ben Pouladian
[00:12:28] S0: Great. Okay. Well, Shiv, thanks for coming on. That is Shiv Verma, the CFO of Robinhood here on TITV. TPUs are taking center stage for Google right now. The Information has exclusive reporting that OpenAI, a Longtime Nvidia customer, is planning to buy Google's rival TPU chips. That scoop came the same day that Oracle said that it will also make TPUs available to its cloud customers. For more analysis, I want to bring on Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures, and Ben Pouladian, Founder and CEO of BEP Research. Gentlemen, welcome to you both. It is great to have you both back. Ben, I want to start with you. So why are Oracle and OpenAI turning to TPUs right now? [00:13:14] S3: I think they... You know, good morning. I think they wanna meet where their customer is. At the end of the day, I've I've written about this before. Google itself, like Google Cloud, buys a lot of NVIDIA compute, and they do a great job of building out their cloud and leasing it out to customers through GCP. And because Oracle is going through this transition of going from a software company to this major cloud provider, they need to follow suit to do the same thing. It's just another product offering in their inventory where they can now offer customers TPU compute. What percentage or what cost is yet to be determined. [00:13:57] S0: Okay. So, Umesh, Ben's making the point, the more variety, the better. But aren't there some benefits here that the TPU has compared to what NVIDIA offers?
00:13:57 · Akash Pasricha, Umesh Padval, Shiv Verma
[00:13:57] S0: Okay. So, Umesh, Ben's making the point, the more variety, the better. But aren't there some benefits here that the TPU has compared to what NVIDIA offers? [00:14:07] S2: So these are two brilliant moves by Google as well as by Oracle. Let me focus on Google. Google has two businesses, the infrastructure business where the TPUs are made and the training happens, and the TK's business which provides cloud services. So this is called cooperation and competition at the best to serve the best customers. So what did Google Cloud do? They used to use their own GPUs and g... And GPUs from NVIDIA, but mostly have their own models hosted on that for their customers. So now the deal with OpenAI is Google Cloud is now gonna provide a variety of proprietary models on their stack to serve their customers. On the other hand, Amin Vahdat, who heads up their infrastructure, did a brilliant move because he feels his TPU is as good or better and give competition to NVIDIA. So what does he do? He strikes a deal with Oracle, which is a cloud competitor of Google Cloud, and provides him access to his best technology. [00:15:18] S1: Right.
00:15:18 · Shiv Verma, Umesh Padval, Akash Pasricha
[00:15:18] S1: Right. [00:15:18] S2: Not only that, as you followed, I think Google is now going into the merchant market for TPUs. This is Oracle is one, but you know a neo cloud called FluidStack, which provides TPUs to Anthropic. So this is called competition between Google and NVIDIA and AMD. And then, regards to Oracle, they're trying to serve their customers with the best possible solutions, whether it's TPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, or the inferencing solutions like SambaNova in a disaggregated stack. It's brilliant. [00:15:59] S0: Okay. So I hear you. Let's talk about what the TPUs are good at compared to GPUs. Mean, Umesh is pointing to inference here. What are some of the advantages that the TPU has over NVIDIA right now in insofar as the work that it's trying to focus on?