She Turned Down Robinhood, Then Called Back | Stephanie Guild, CIO of Robinhood

🎟️ Stephanie is keynoting the inaugural Womansplain Summit, October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137

Season 6 is here, and we're opening with someone who walked away from 21 years of white-glove finance to help everyone else get in the game.

Stephanie Guild, CFA, spent two decades at JPMorgan, most recently as a Managing Director at the Private Bank, building portfolios for the kind of clients who can always find help. Then she left to become Chief Investment Officer of Robinhood, the mobile-first platform with 27 million customers and over 300 billion dollars in assets. She turned the offer down, woke up the next morning asking what she'd done, and called her would-be boss to take it back. Four and a half years later she's built First Trade Recommendations, the Investors Guild blog, retirement accounts with a match, and Robinhood Strategies, the managed-portfolio product she calls her baby.

In this episode, Stephanie gets into why she left the exclusivity of private banking to open investing up to everyone, how she builds client trust through a phone app instead of a corner office, why she refuses to dumb finance down with cute alliterations, and how she decides what to say when she's one of the most quoted voices in the market (see: "stagflation-ish"). She walks through the three phases of the AI buildout and where we actually are, why she won't let AI trade a dollar of client money, her real worry about a generation learning to model with AI as a crutch, and how to think about the balance between equity, cash, and the angel investing everyone suddenly wants in on. Plus the line from her dad she still hears before every hard room: act like you belong, because you do.

Whether you're managing your own money for the first time, building something and wondering if you can afford the risk, or just tired of finance being made to feel harder than it is, this one's for you.

💌 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership

Find Robinhood: 🔗 robinhood.com 📚 Investors Guild at learn.robinhood.com 📲 @stephguildNYC

Find Womansplain: 📲 @womansplainpod ✉️ hello@womansplainpod.com 📰 womansplainpod.com/newsletter