Vlad Tenev

Vladimir Tenev (Bulgarian: Владимир Тенев; born 13 February 1987) is an American entrepreneur who is most notably the co-founder (with Baiju Bhatt), Chairman, and CEO of Robinhood, a US-based financial technology services company.

Tenev moved to the United States from his native Bulgaria at the age of five. After studying mathematics at Stanford and UCLA and getting a master's degree, he decided to partner with Baiju Bhatt to create several fintech startups. One of them, Robinhood, became a publicly-traded multibillion-dollar company.

Early life and education

Tenev was born in Varna, Bulgaria. When he was a toddler, his parents migrated to the U.S. leaving him with his grandparents before he joined them when he was five. His parents both worked for the World Bank. He attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia, to which he later donated $125,000.

He earned a bachelor's of science degree in mathematics from Stanford University, where he met Baiju Bhatt. He was a member of a fraternity at Stanford. In 2008, he earned a master's degree in mathematics from the University of California in Los Angeles, and originally intended to study for a PhD in mathematics at UCLA and pursue a career in academia. He instead dropped out to work with Bhatt.

Career

Early career

In 2010, Tenev and Baiju Bhatt started a high-frequency trading software company called Celeris, based in New York. By January 2011 they abandoned it to create Chronos Research, which sold low-latency software to other trading firms and banks. Later in 2011, they moved to California.