VLAD TENEV, CEO and president of Robinhood, the commission-free trading platform, is in the firm’s basement gym in Menlo Park, California, firing off jabs and uppercuts at Adam Azevedo, his trainer.
“It’s cathartic,” Tenev says, grinning, after several furious rounds, brushing a sweaty fringe of black hair off his face. “Training improves my mood. Lowers my stress. The fact that there is a routine makes me feel like I’m more in control of myself and my surroundings.” Given the volatility of the stock market, it’s easy to see why he craves control. Work is “nonstop strategizing, building and testing new products while also problem-solving,” he says of Robinhood, with its $7.6 billion valuation and more than 23 million users. In the gym, where Tenev, 36, trains with Azevedo three days a week, he brings the same intense focus to his workouts.
“I’ve always been competitive,” he says. “As a kid, I wanted to get the best grades and be the best at soccer, basketball, and baseball. My family moved from Bulgaria to Delaware when I was five, and they worked really hard to stay. My parents would always tell me, ‘Our future in this country is uncertain.’ As an immigrant, I felt like I had to work ten times harder than everyone else.”
That was his mindset in 2017, when he started doing a strength-building program on his own. “It felt like a game, focusing on heavy squats and deadlifts and watching my numbers go up,” he recalls. Then: game over. His doctor told him the excruciating pain shooting down his right leg was due to a herniated L5-S1 disc in his lower back. His first child was about to be born, and Tenev decided against surgery. “I had heard too many horror stories of back surgeries gone wrong,” he says. For the first six months, merely getting out of a chair triggered pulsating agony. Two years after the injury, he completed physical therapy and was finally pain-free. He hasn’t had an ache since. “Knock on wood,” he says. But the episode taught him there’s a difference between working hard and working smart. “I didn’t spend time getting the movement right, so when the weights got bigger and the stakes were higher, even small mistakes could cause a real issue.” Regaining his fitness was a process.
“First, we had to make sure Vlad’s back and core were strong and his hips were mobile,” says Azevedo. During 2020, the two trained online and eased into strength work with dumbbells.“That was really good for me,” says Tenev, with a humility not normally associated with fintech CEOs. “I learned the proper form and began feeling more comfortable, so by the time I was going after barbells again, I felt more knowledgeable.”
Today, after ripping through several sets of handstand pushups, weighted pullups, and bench presses, he steps into a trap bar loaded with 300 pounds. As he bends his knees, adjusts his six-foot-one frame to the proper position, sets his grip on the handles, then exhales and powers upward for six reps, you’d never suspect the guy had suffered a serious back injury.
There’s an analogy in all of this, of course—the rush to get bigger and more powerful, the calamitous setback, the slower, thoughtful rebuilding—to Tenev’s journey with Robinhood. The company had a promising launch in 2015, but then in 2021 Robinhood became the epicenter of the GameStop fiasco, which dinged its reputation and inspired the movie Dumb Money. (Sebastian Stan plays Tenev.) Now that the company is in a recovery phase—it has begun offering retirement accounts, and a credit card is on the horizon—Tenev is leaning into the philosophical takeaways from his hard-won fitness success.
He says running a company can be stressful, but sticking with a training routine and working out no matter what happens has had mental benefits. “I used to be very goal oriented,” he says. “Now I think committing to a routine, showing up, giving 100 percent, in fitness and at work, is more powerful. I’m less interested in achieving a goal than in being above average in important areas—flexibility, strength, balance, coordination. I want to set myself up for the long term. That goes for business as well.”
Ginny Graves
Ginny Graves is a health and psychology writer from California.
