Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:19:50 · Micky Malka
[00:19:50] S2: Yeah. That January of twenty twenty, twenty one? I think the story starts nine months before. There was a moment in, I think April or May, right when lockdowns were happening and where their growth, because people were starting to trade and open accounts and get into the markets because of all the subsidies and incentives, that their system went down for two days or one day of trading because they collapsed. They were just opening too many accounts. They had anybody remote. It was bad. And they had a lot of bad press. And I remember having a call with Vlad that afternoon and saying, hey, is this gonna happen against us? I don't think so. I think we have a solution. Okay, you're growing way too fast. What else do we need to... We always think about this framework about brand. How do you communicate? About people, how do you talk to them? About how you invest your time and capital. So we went through it. In And the capital piece, we said, how is your capital base right now to sustain this level of growth? He says, we're fine, but it can... It could get stressed if this keeps going. So nine months before, we sat with Jason and Shiv, which is part of finance team, Jason is CFO and Shiv works with him, and our team here. And we put together a term sheet that had all the terms with brackets ready on what it will take to put emergency capital in. We thought about it, we wrote it, We discussed it. We went back and forth. We didn't need it. And we both agreed it was perfect, and we put it in a drawer. We never knew why we could need it, but it was a good thing to just know that we had it there. So you fast forward to January, and GameStop happens and all these meme stocks happen and the regulators come with this super crazy unheard rule out of the blue saying you have to put all your customers exposure that they have put on in the last day from your balance sheet in collateral while the trade settles. It's unheard of. So the request was for $3,000,000,000 at five in the morning before market opens. Exactly. It's insane. So I get the phone call and Vlad tells me this. I'm like, no. He says, what do mean? No. No. You call back and you say no. That's crazy. That's unheard of. They're doing the math wrong. This cannot be... I mean, the customer's money was in the bank. Yeah. But you're gonna attach it. It's their customer's money.
00:22:06 · Micky Malka, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
You can only attach it the day of settlement. So understanding this business, because I had built a brokerage dealer when I was 17. I had built an online broker dealer. We understood everybody here, understood the business model. So we knew there was no capital risk. It was all requirement of some liquidity risk. There was no liquidity risk. It was capital constraints. So he calls me back and says, we're gonna talk to them, but I need the money. So I said, okay. Give me half an hour. Give me an hour. And I wake up the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, back then Greg Becker. And I said, have I ever asked you a favor from you? And he says, yes, once. And it was very painful. And his favor was helping Coinbase get bank accounts in 2013 because no one will open the account to them. [00:22:51] S0: Oh, interesting. [00:22:52] S2: And it was the first bank account that Coinbase had for the first three years. I said, well, need one. And he says, what's up? He says, I need to overdraft every line that Ribbit has for $500,000,000. And he says, what? By when? I said, by nine in the morning. And he says, what happened? So I explained to him what happened. He said, let me call my team. And our team here, we were multitasking with Robinhood team on the term sheet. Already had it done. We were just feeding the brackets. At the same time, talking to Silicon Valley Bank, defining how to do this. And by their credit, by 09:30 in the morning, we were wiring $500,000,000 to Robinhood. Wow. And with that term sheet, a lot of capital followed later that day and later that weekend.
00:22:52 · Micky Malka, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:22:52] S2: And it was the first bank account that Coinbase had for the first three years. I said, well, need one. And he says, what's up? He says, I need to overdraft every line that Ribbit has for $500,000,000. And he says, what? By when? I said, by nine in the morning. And he says, what happened? So I explained to him what happened. He said, let me call my team. And our team here, we were multitasking with Robinhood team on the term sheet. Already had it done. We were just feeding the brackets. At the same time, talking to Silicon Valley Bank, defining how to do this. And by their credit, by 09:30 in the morning, we were wiring $500,000,000 to Robinhood. Wow. And with that term sheet, a lot of capital followed later that day and later that weekend. [00:23:43] S0: What an incredible day. Where does that rank in the craziest days of your career? [00:23:49] S2: You know, there are those days that you remember where you were. [00:23:52] S0: Yeah. You can picture [00:23:53] S2: the You picture everything. I tend to walk when I'm on the phone, when I speak. I'm not good sitting. I will tell you that that day I looked at my watch, I had done a full marathon walking on the phone. I had done almost 24 miles of walking in a room, in an office just walking because I needed to think and react and call. So I will never forget a day. [00:24:15] S0: Thinking back on it, what lesson do you take from it? What did you learn that you didn't know prior to going through that experience?
00:24:22 · Micky Malka
[00:24:22] S2: A lot of different aspects. Number one, you always forget because I was there for a long time in that seat, it's very lonely to be the CEO. And to be there when that happens, that call doesn't happen if you are not spending time for the previous seven or eight years since we're investors, getting to know him, getting to know his family, getting to know his team, getting to know the company. Because those solutions don't come out of the blue. And if they do, they're mercenary and they try to kill you. Number one. Number two is the mindset and the culture of being flexible, of taking asymmetric informed risk when you understand the variables. You sleep better at night and you're comfortable with your skin when you do it like that. When you truly deeply know what you're doing versus guessing. We truly understood what we were doing. We made one mistake in that day. We didn't spend enough time understanding the brand consequences that will be so long lasting for something that the entire market did wrong for one day. And Robinhood became the child star of the GameStop saga to the point of having movies. Now there's a saying that says, it doesn't matter what they say about you as long as they talk about you. So you could you could take that argument. But on the other hand, it took Vlad and Baiju and it took the team and it took the market almost two and a half years to get out of that PTSD. And I think the biggest lesson is not that day. The biggest lesson is being there for those next two and a half years as they navigate out of that cycle.
00:26:00 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:26:00] S0: I'd love to zoom to the present now. You focused a lot on money in the first chapter of Ribbit's existence, and I think the grid concept, sort of global digital grid is something that you're focused very carefully on today. Can you just describe how you came to this idea and what you mean by it?
00:26:17 · Micky Malka
[00:26:17] S2: The grid is our version of the matrix of that interconnectivity of different aspects that make us who we are and how we transact and live in this world. And you could think about the grid as if you think about the internet, it's a grid of itself. It's a grid full of data and knowledge. If you think about money and wealth, there's been grids for the last fifty years that allow you to move money in real time, in delay time, in slow times, you got Visa networks, MasterCard, Fedwire, ACH, UPI, PIX, they're all financial design grids. And then if you think about electricity, we think about the electric grid, and we think about towers and power meters and transformers and high voltage and all of those things. What will happen if you actually thought that they were all combined into one, they actually need each other. There is no knowledge grid without power, and there is no power without money. And if you combine them all together, and you think about them as just one single grid that has to connect all of these things at the same time, it's quite rare and unique because it hasn't happened in a long time. These grids have been independent forever. The financial grid has been independent for five, six hundred years. The internet, the data grid has been independent for twenty five years. The electric grid has been evolving for just one hundred and forty years. But now we hit a moment in time when the three of them are converging in a way that we have not seen in almost five hundred years. And the last time we've seen that was probably in the late fourteen, 1500s with the printing press. What people have to understand is that the printing press by itself was not the event. The printing press, what it did was it allow you to print all the knowledge that was written three, four hundred years, thousands of years before that. The same way AI right now is the printing press moment, but it's only possible because we have digitized every single piece of content for the last thirty years. So what took hundreds of years of human scriptures to write history and contents back then for the printing press to print has taken thirty five years now or forty years to digitize. So now the AI engines can actually work on it and tokenize. And so you have knowledge in ways that we've never have been tokenized.